Plant-insect interactions in the era of consolidation in biological sciences: Nicotiana attenuata as an ecological expression system

Abstract

The past decades have seen an intense development of organismal biology and genomics of individual species on the one hand, and population biology and evolutionary ecology on the other. While the great discoveries fuelled by the current model systems will continue over the next decades, more and more discoveries will occur at the interface between different biological disciplines. It is through such integrative approaches that the mechanisms of evolution and adaptation will be revealed. The study of plant–insect interactions, exemplary among such integrative research fields, unifies research efforts on the cellular and organismal level with those on the whole-plant and community level. Recent studies on the wild tobacco plant Nicotiana attenuata illustrate both the value of using genetic and molecular tools in ecological research and the importance of profound natural-history knowledge when studying plant– insect interactions