Atmospheric Ecometabolomics
EMSL Project ID
48729
Abstract
Compounds such as alpha-pinene, isoprene, ethene and methanol are well known to sub-disciplines in both geosciences and biology. They are known as biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) to atmospheric chemists and are of interest because of their important role in controlling atmospheric distributions of the oxidants and aerosols that regulate air quality and climate. They are known as metabolites to the biologists who observe changes in an organism’s metabolome and use this to study how organism responds to the environment. More recently, ecologists have extended these techniques to develop ecometabolomics approaches for investigations of the functioning of whole ecosystems and their response to environmental change. Ecometabolomics has been used, for example, to study strategies for allocating resources and to advance understanding of the coupling between cellular metabolism, ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling. Atmospheric chemists and metabolomists are both faced with the formidable challenge of characterizing a system that includes hundreds to thousands of organic compounds including some highly complex molecules. While the metabolomics community has made considerable progress in applying analytical approaches that consider a large part of the metabolome, atmospheric chemists typically characterize only a small subset of total profile. The atmospheric chemistry community could greatly benefit from applying the analytical techniques and multivariate analyses of large databases that are routinely used for metabolomics studies and this could lead to a transformational advance in our capability for predicting how the earth system will respond to global change. This foray into the unexplored organic constituents in the earth's atmosphere could lead to improved representation of the aerosol life cycle which is a major uncertainty in climate models. The ecological community could also benefit from atmospheric measurements that reflect the response of an entire ecosystem to environmental changes. It should be recognized that the integration of atmospheric organics measurements and ecometabolomics is not straightforward and the utility of this proposed research has yet to be determined. Therefore an initial assessment of atmospheric ecometabolomics is needed to determine the potential for making significant advances in atmospheric chemistry and ecology.
Project Details
Start Date
2014-10-01
End Date
2015-09-30
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members
Related Publications
Rivas-Ubach A, A Barbeta, J Sardans, AB Guenther, R Ogaya, M Oravec, O Urban, and J Penuelas. 2016. "Topsoil depth substantially influences the responses to drought of the foliar metabolomes of Mediterranean forests." Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 21:41-54. doi:10.1016/j.ppees.2016.06.001
Rivas-Ubach A, J Sardans, JA Hodar, J Garcia-Porta, AB Guenther, L Pasa Tolic, M Oravec, O Urban, and J Penuelas. 2017. "Close and Distant: Contrasting the Metabolism of Two Closely Related Subspecies of Scots Pine Under the Effects of Folivory and Summer Drought." Ecology and Evolution 7(21):8976-8988. doi:10.1002/ece3.3343
Rivas-Ubach A., Y. Liu, A.L. Steiner, J. Sardans, M.M. Tfaily, G.R. Kulkarni, and Y. Kim, et al. 2019. "Atmo-ecometabolomics: a novel atmospheric particle chemical characterization methodology for ecological research." Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 191, no. 2:Article No. 78. PNNL-SA-118888. doi:10.1007/s10661-019-7205-x
Rivas-Ubach A., Y. Liu, A.L. Steiner, J. Sardans, M.M. Tfaily, Y. Kim, and E.C. Bourrianne, et al. 2019. "Atmo-ecometabolomics: a novel atmospheric particle chemical characterization methodology for ecological research." Atmospheric Measurement Techniques. PNNL-SA-118888.