Chemical gradients of plant substrates in an atta texana fungus garden

Many ant species grow fungus gardens that predigest food as an essential step of the ants' nutrient uptake. These symbiotic fungus gardens have long been studied and feature a gradient of increasing substrate degradation from top to bottom. To further facilitate the study of fungus gardens and enable the understanding of the predigestion process in more detail than currently known, we applied recent mass spectrometry-based approaches and generated a three-dimensional (3D) molecular map of an Atta texana fungus garden to reveal chemical modifications as plant substrates pass through it. The metabolomics approach presented in this study can be applied to study similar processes in natural environments to compare with lab-maintained ecosystems.

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Caraballo-Rodríguez, Andrés Mauricio, Puckett, Sara P., Kyle, Kathleen E., Petras, Daniel, da Silva, Ricardo, Nothias, Louis Félix, Ernst, Madeleine, van der Hooft, Justin J.J., Tripathi, Anupriya, Wang, Mingxun, Balunas, Marcy J., Klassen, Jonathan L., Dorrestein, Pieter C.
Format: Article/Letter to editor biblioteca
Language:English
Subjects:Ant fungus garden, Atta texana, Chemical transformation, Fungal symbiont, Mass spectrometry, Metabolomics, Molecular cartography,
Online Access:https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/chemical-gradients-of-plant-substrates-in-an-atta-texana-fungus-g
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Summary:Many ant species grow fungus gardens that predigest food as an essential step of the ants' nutrient uptake. These symbiotic fungus gardens have long been studied and feature a gradient of increasing substrate degradation from top to bottom. To further facilitate the study of fungus gardens and enable the understanding of the predigestion process in more detail than currently known, we applied recent mass spectrometry-based approaches and generated a three-dimensional (3D) molecular map of an Atta texana fungus garden to reveal chemical modifications as plant substrates pass through it. The metabolomics approach presented in this study can be applied to study similar processes in natural environments to compare with lab-maintained ecosystems.