Recent breakthroughs in metabolomics promise to reveal the cryptic chemical traits that mediate plant community composition, character evolution and lineage diversification

What is it about?

Biologists have long proposed a fundamental role for plant chemical defenses in the evolutionary origins and ecological coexistence of plant diversity. Novel methods for comparing the structures of unknown molecules make it possible to test these ideas, even in diverse plant communities such as tropical forests, for the first time in the 50 years since they were proposed.

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