The downside of metabolic diversity: Postingestive rearrangements by specialized insects

Abstract

SignificanceHigher plants produce specialized metabolites to cope with biotic and abiotic challenges faced in natural environments. The diversity and complexity of specialized metabolism is often beneficial, providing functional synergisms and evolutionary stability when metabolic solutions to ecological problems are deployed as mixtures. These benefits of diversity have recently been realized in the deployment of antibiotics, insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides. However, the functional downside of metabolite diversity is rarely studied, in part because the mechanisms of post-ingestive metabolite interactions are largely unknown. Here we showed that larvae of the tobacco hornworm,Manduca sexta, rearrange key constituents of two distinct defense pathways in its wild tobacco host plant,Nicotiana attenuata, to thwart the defensive properties of both pathways.