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 .