3.6 | Metabolomic comparison of fenced and unfencedE. alatus plants
We identified 1,153 metabolite features from the untargeted metabolomic analysis of all E. alatus plants. The PCA that we conducted using these features did not produce clearly distinct clusters based on treatment (Figure 7A ). Using PLS-DA, we identified the top 15 metabolite features that separate these samples into two groups based on treatment (Figure 7 B, C ). Similarly, the HCA identified the top 25 significant metabolite features that differed significantly among whole group and whose accumulation pattern clustered the 12 samples into two nearly distinct groups: fenced and unfenced (Figure 7D ). Among the top metabolic pathways predicted by the GSEA are glutathione metabolism (P = 0.02), pentose phosphate pathway (P = 0.04), and alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolism (P = 0.04) (Appendix Table 6 ). All of the significantly overrepresented pathways are involved in stress response and/or detoxification of defensive related metabolites .