Metabolomic Contributions to Chemical Ecology

Recent developments in metabolomics enable new approaches to characterize the chemically mediated interactions between organisms and their environment. Based on the rapid assessment of the global content of small metabolites in a living organism, metabolomic techniques complement the traditional methods of bioassay-guided fractionation to identify chemical cues and to elucidate the impacts of chemical communication in ecosystem functioning. This chapter presents a description of the strategies of metabolomic approaches and of their specificities for chemical ecology. It provides several examples of such approaches to resolve questions in chemotaxonomy, to decipher the pathways of biosynthesis of chemical mediators, and also in studies of biotic interactions. The chapter also highlights a booming domain of environmental metabolomics which explain the interactions between organisms and their environment to address the functioning of an organism at the molecular level and/or inform on the state of the environment.