Course Objective:
Can it be detected from a plant what is happening in the environment before it becomes visible? Can we use plants as environmental sensors and recognize drought/flooding, pollution, temperature stress, pathogen or herbivore attack, and other changes in the environment from their chemical profile?
Plants cannot escape environmental change; they chemically ?record? it, and within this course students learn to read and understand this record. Students experiment with plant metabolites, analyze real data, and, with the help of statistics and AI, search for chemical ?signatures? of environmental stress.
Why is this important?
Climate change, environmental pollution, and increasing pressure on natural resources create a need for fast and reliable ways of monitoring environmental conditions. The future of monitoring will not be based only on noticing a change when it is already visible, but on being able to detect, measure, and predict it earlier. Therefore, experts who understand how to connect a biological sample, laboratory analysis, large amounts of data, statistics, and AI in order to obtain useful information from data are becoming increasingly important.
In this course, students gain experience in working with technologies and approaches that are applied in ecology, environmental protection, and the development of new analytical and predictive methods. We do not learn only what happens to a plant, but also how to arrive at answers from biological data that can be applied in the real world.
Skill we will develop: to transform complex biological data into information that can be used to understand, monitor, and predict environmental conditions, and how to apply that information to solve a real-world problem. The goal is to develop the ability to transform complex biological data into useful information, and useful information into an applicable solution.
Lectures will cover the following topics:
1. Characteristics of bioindicators, biomonitors, and biomarkers ? the role of plants as primary bioindicators in terrestrial ecosystems.
2. Chemical communication between plants and the environment ? plant?air, plant?soil, plant?herbivore, and plant?pathogen interactions.
3. Bioindicators and traditional monitoring methods ? advantages, limitations, and possibilities for combining different approaches.
4. Indicator species in biomonitoring ? an overview of plant species with broad and narrow ecological amplitudes.
5. Plant chemical compounds ? primary and specialized metabolites, their evolution, functions, and role in plant adaptation and chemical defense.
6. Primary plant metabolites (carbohydrates, lipids, proteins) as biomarkers of environmental stress.
7. Specialized plant metabolites (terpenoids, polyphenols, glucosinolates, alkaloids, alkylamides) as biomarkers of environmental stress.
8. Phytochemical markers of responses to biotic stress ? interactions with herbivores, pathogens, and other organisms.
9. Phytochemical markers of adaptation and resistance to climate change ? high and low temperatures, drought, and flooding.
10. Phytochemical markers of responses to pollution of soil, water, and air.
11. Volatile terpenoids in the interaction between the biosphere and atmosphere ? their role in plant communication and their connection with environmental changes.
12. Application of phytochemistry in ecosystem monitoring ? examples and protocols.
13. Integration of plant metabolite data into bioindicator and ecological stress indices.
14. Storage, digitization, and analysis of plant metabolomics data ? FAIR principles and databases.
15. Statistical analysis and visualization of phytochemical data ? ANOVA, PCA, hierarchical clustering (HC), and PLS-DA.
Laboratory exercises are designed in the form of a "case study" - collection of plant material and laboratory analyses, data processing, visualization, and interpretation:
1. Collection of plant material in different ecosystems.
2. Extraction and quantification of phytochemical compounds using different analytical methods (UV-Vis, HPLC).
3. Processing, statistical analysis, and visualization of phytochemical data ? data organization and cleaning, selection of appropriate statistical methods, analysis of patterns and relationships among metabolites, and graphical presentation of results.
4. Integration and interpretation of results ? linking phytochemical changes with environmental stress and development of a simple bioindicator index of ecological stress.
Literature:
1. Pdf presentations in MS Team.
2. Secondary Metabolites in Plant Stress Adaptation: Analytic Space of Secondary Metabolites (Signaling and Communication in Plants) (2024) Edited by Nabil Semmar. Springer, ISBN-10:3031525949, ISBN-13: ?978-3031525940
3. The Ecology of Plant Secondary Metabolites: From Genes to Global Processes (2012) Edited by Glenn R. Iason, Marcel Dicke, Susan E. Hartley. Cambridge University Press, Online ISBN 9780511675751, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511675751
4. Plant Metabolites and Regulation Under Environmental Stress (2018) Edited by: Parvaiz Ahmad, Mohammad Abass Ahanger, ? Mohammed Nasser Alyemeni. Academic Press, ISBN: 978-0-12-812689-9, https://doi.org/10.1016/C2016-0-03727-0
5. Plant Metabolites under Environmental Stress Mechanisms, Responses, and Adaptation Strategies (2023) Edited by Nivas M. Desai, Manasi Patil, Umesh R. Pawar. Apple Academic Press, ISBN 9781774910948, ISBN 9781003304869 (e-book)
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