Comptes Rendus Chimie

Muhammad Yerizam

Asyeni Miftahul Jannah

Nabila Aprianti

Yandriani Yandriani

Muhammad Rendana

Annisa Qonita Ernas

Juice Lowise Tamba

Bioethanol production from coconut husk using DES-NADES pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis method

Ariane de Espindola

Simona M. Miron

Patrick Dutournié

Arnaud Ponche

Ultrafiltration operational conditions influence in the antibacterial activity of native and thermally treated lysozyme

Hamed Kalawoun

Michel Obeid

Carmen Ciotonea

Muriel Chaghouri

Christophe Poupin

Samer Aouad

Madona Labaki

Cédric Gennequin

Edmond Abi-Aad

François Delattre

Review on the contribution of ultrasounds in layered double hydroxides synthesis and in their performances

Sameh Aoun

Joe Massouh

Noémie Scornet

Laurent Giordano

Alphonse Tenaglia

Gérard Buono

Patrick Rey

Virginie Bellière-Baca

Damien Hérault

Indium-catalysed ring opening of 2-hydroxybutyrolactone through the cleavage of C(sp$^3$)–O bond

Walid Chaouch

Slah Msahli

Development of a reliable and efficient combined grinding and separation process for PVC-coated fabric waste

Amit Kumar

Peter István Dalko

Release of biologically relevant substrates from prodrugs and nanocarriers using X- and γ-rays as trigger signals

Haining Li

Tiantian Zhang

Kai Tang

Binglin Li

Xiaoli Zhang

Binxia Zhao

Jiao Wang

Preparation of hyperbranched 4-dimethylaminopyridine catalyst for the efficient synthesis of vitamin E succinate

Iliana Papamichael

Foteini Tsiolaki

Marinos Stylianou

Irene Voukkali

Georgia Sourkouni

Nikolaos Argirusis

Christos Argirusis

Antonis A. Zorpas

Evaluation of the effectiveness and performance of environmental impact assessment studies in Greece

Comptes Rendus
Chimie
Anne-Geneviève Bagnères and Olivier P. Thomas
Foreword: chemical mediation in the environment – Chemical ecology and the
French GDR MediatEC
Volume 26, Special Issue S2 (2023), p. 3-5
Online since: 19 November 2024
Issue date: 13 February 2025
Part of Special Issue: Chemical Ecology – Chemical Mediation in the Environment
Guest editors: Anne-Geneviève Bagnères (Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et
Evolutive (CEFE), Montpellier, France) and Olivier Thomas (University of Galway,
Ireland)
https://doi.org/10.5802/crchim.354
This article is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
C EN T R E
MER S ENN E
The Comptes Rendus. Chimie are a member of the
Mersenne Center for open scientific publishing
www.centre-mersenne.org — e-ISSN : 1878-1543
Comptes Rendus
Chimie
2023, Vol. 26, Special Issue S2, p. 3-5
https://doi.org/10.5802/crchim.354
Chemical Ecology – Chemical Mediation in the Environment
Foreword: chemical mediation in the environment –
Chemical ecology and the French GDR MediatEC
Anne-Geneviève Bagnères ,a and Olivier P. Thomas ,b
a Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CEFE), CNRS – University of
Montpellier - EPHE – IRD, 1919 route de Mende, 34293 Montpellier Cedex 5, France
b School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Ryan Institute, University of Galway,
H91TK33 Galway, Ireland
E-mail: ag.bagneres@cefe.cnrs.fr (A.-G. Bagnères)
Chemical mediation refers to the process by which
chemicals, both natural and synthetic, influence
the interactions and behaviours of living organisms
within ecosystems. These molecules usually affect
various biological processes, including growth, re-
production, communication, and defence mecha-
nisms among plants, animals, and microorganisms.
The concept is at the core of the scientific field of
chemical ecology and it encompasses the study of
how these chemicals are produced, released, trans-
ported, and transformed in the environment, as well
as their ecological and health impacts.
Historically, chemical ecology has first focused
on plants and their chemically mediated interac-
tions, with other living organisms such as insects,
microbes but also other plants and animals. Such
chemical cues have been identified as end prod-
ucts of secondary or specialised metabolic path-
ways finely tuned through a long evolutionary his-
tory and leading to a structurally unique and inspir-
ing chemical diversity of bioactive metabolites. With
the expansion of microbiology, close associations be-
tween plants and microbes such as bacteria or fungi
were also identified as being mediated by chemical
cues. Then, plant–plant communication was also
evidenced to be mediated by volatile metabolites
through the concept of allelopathy. While plants re-
main a major subfield of chemical ecology, interac-
tions between other living organisms soon became
of huge interest for the broader community. With
the discovery of additional sources of chemical diver-
sity in the marine environment and in the microbial
world, it soon became evident that chemical interac-
tions are ubiquitous and would benefit from the cre-
ation of a scientific consortium. With the develop-
ment of always greener practices, chemical ecology is
now offering new opportunities in diverse fields, for
example through the natural biocontrol for the pro-
liferation of invasive species or pests.
By nature, chemical ecology is multi- and inter-
disciplinary and the endeavour to build a large re-
search group around chemical ecology was mainly
supported and funded by the CNRS in France. The
GDR MediatEC (CNRS 3658) was launched in 2014
from the merger of two similar and previous ac-
tions centred on chemical ecology in the terrestrial
environment and marine biologists and chemists.
The benefits of positive interactions between these
communities were evident very early and resulted
in a long list of positive collaborations and inter-
actions between scientists of different backgrounds
and centres of interest. For instance, the natural
product chemists with deep knowledge especially
when working on complex marine natural prod-
ucts brought their expertise to the (micro)biologists
working on terrestrial models. A key component of
the success of the GDR MediatEC was the creation
and optimal use of shared facilities and expensive
ISSN (electronic): 1878-1543 https://comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/chimie/
4 Anne-Geneviève Bagnères and Olivier P. Thomas
equipment by both communities in the terrestrial
and aquatic fields. In addition to the yearly friendly
meetings of the GDR organised all across France
since 2014, we must mention the financial support
for attending conferences or projects and the pub-
lication of a special issue entitled Aquatic Chemical
Ecology in the journal Aquatic Ecology [1] and also a
co-authoring book on Chemical Ecology in 2016 [2]
translated afterwards in French (2017) and Spanish
(2020) languages. Based on all these successes of
this programme that also helped to build an interna-
tional recognition of the French community working
in chemical ecology, this collaborative network was
renewed in 2018 for an additional 4 years and was
terminated in 2022. Further actions are ongoing to
maintain links between all members of this commu-
nity such as creating a Thematic network (CNRS-RT).
The main thematic areas of research supported
during these 8 years were:
• Chemical ecology and evolution
• Chemical diversity and biosynthesis
• Chemical mediation
• Chemical ecology in a changing environ-
ment
• Applied chemical ecology
These research themes were led by two to three re-
searchers from different institutions and background
to foster positive interactions. They were supported
by technological platforms and infrastructures dedi-
cated to the study of chemical interactions including
the development of new tools in metabolomics.
A diversity of authors forms different backgrounds
and disciplines have contributed to this special is-
sue as a reflection of the interdisciplinarity of the
consortium. The erudite and fine analysis of Benid-
dir and Poupon [3] starts with a brief and mean-
ingful history of natural product chemistry and its
importance for pharmacy and drug discovery. The
point-of-view article then gives some insights on the
importance of synthetic biology and bioinformatics
for the future development of the field of pharma-
cognosy and the positive inclusion of metabolites
of diverse origin including the marine environment
and microbes. As a confirmation that the marine
environment is becoming of growing interest for the
society, Rousseau et al. [4] present a review on the
chemical interplay that takes place within the sea-
weed holobiont. This fundamental knowledge is
bringing key contributions in the context of the “sea-
weed revolution” and the blue bioeconomy. The fol-
lowing article shows how dynamic the research on
microbes of marine origin is in the French scientific
community. Bertrand and coworkers [5] studied the
change in metabolome and lipidome of a fungus of
marine origin when grown in different conditions.
This study highlights the importance of new tools
developed in bioinformatics for the annotation of
metabolites present in minute quantities. Allelopa-
thy has been studied by Tison-Rosebery et al. [6] be-
tween a proliferative macrophyte in Aquitaine lakes
and blooms of the cyanobacteria Microcystis aerug-
inosa using also a metabolomics approach by LC-
HRMS. The presence of metabolites downregulating
the growth of the cyanobacteria could help mitigat-
ing the negative effects of its blooms. As presented
by Eparvier and coworkers [7], molecular networking
using t-SNE available in the newly developed soft-
ware MetGem has been used to annotate the an-
timicrobial and defence metabolites produced by a
bacterial strain present in a termite. A subsequent
study by Touboul and coworkers [8] applies similar
bioinformatics tools to the GC-MS data obtained on
the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by
a South American plant in order to identify antifun-
gal metabolites. The soil is an example of medium
where complex interactions mediated by chemical
cues between organisms take place. In the study by
Chauvat and coworkers [9], the impact of the pres-
ence of an insect in the vicinity of plant roots in-
duced a change in the metabolome of the soil. As
nicely illustrated by Mondet et al. [10], pheromones
are essential metabolites for insects and especially
for honeybees. A seasonal change in the metabolome
of the brood has been observed and needs now to
be better analysed and understood. Plant–insect in-
teractions are still full of surprises as exemplified by
the identification by Gibernau et al. [11] of an un-
usual VOC from the Mediterranean plant Arum pic-
tum that can play a role in the attraction of a diver-
sity of insects. Chemical emissions of the almond
tree were for the first time investigated under chang-
ing conditions by Leconte et al. [12]. Identification of
some VOCs involved in the positive interaction with
the almond wasp could serve as a natural biocon-
trol of its proliferation. As demonstrated by Richard
and coworkers [13], the presence of endosymbionts
in the male terrestrial isopode known as potato bug
Anne-Geneviève Bagnères and Olivier P. Thomas 5
modifies the metabolome composition of its cuti-
cle while becoming feminised. Despite this change
in reproductive behaviour, these individuals remain
less attractive to males, which could be linked to this
change in the metabolomics profile. Insects continue
to be an important source of chemical diversity as
exemplified by the discovery of new alkaloids of the
azamacrolide family found in several species of la-
dybirds by Magro et al. [14]. The presence of ma-
jor families of specialised metabolites should be in-
cluded into the integrative approaches used in phy-
logenetics studies of plants and animals. Contact
and distance interactions are the two modes of ac-
tions of chemically mediated interactions and they
are usually difficult to tell apart in chemical ecol-
ogy. Menacer et al. [15] were able to show that, for
the cabbage root fly, VOCs act mainly when in mix-
tures, and have effects either at distance or at con-
tact, but not both. In a changing environment, trees
represent nutritional resources for bumble bees and
flowering species are crucial to sustain colony initia-
tion through chemical mediation. Gekière et al. [16]
showed that orchards are good candidates to off-
set the ongoing decline of early flowering willows.
Therefore, conservation strategies should consider
specialised metabolite profiles, especially flavonoids,
when designing agri-environmental schemes to sup-
port wild bee. The identification of pheromones in
invasive species of insects such as hornets in Eu-
rope is highly relevant for biocontrol. To this end,
Darrouzet and coworkers [17] have characterised the
chemical profiles of the putative pheromones con-
tained in the venom glands of four types of female
hornets.
Overall, this special issue presents a broad
overview of the evolving field of chemical ecology
in France developed through the GDR MediatEC,
spanning from the historical plant–insect interaction
to the more recent marine and microbial environ-
ments. It highlights how dynamic the field is through
the different disciplines and environments involved,
and the valuable inputs it gives to both basic and
applied science especially in a time of drastic global
change.
References
[1] O. P. Thomas, A.-G. Bagnères, Aquat. Ecol., 2022, 56, 337-338.
[2] A.-G. Bagnères, M. Hossaert-Mckey (eds.), Chemical Ecology,
ISTE Ltd, London, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-84821-924-3.
[3] M. A. Beniddir, E. Poupon, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 7-21.
[4] C. Rousseau, G. Demoulinger, S. Rousvoal et al., C. R. Chim.,
2023, 26, 23-47.
[5] V.-T. Le, S. Bertrand, M. Brandolini-Bunlon et al., C. R. Chim.,
2023, 26, 49-66.
[6] J. Tison-Rosebery, S. Moreira, M. Eon et al., C. R. Chim., 2023,
26, 67-81.
[7] D. Nguyen, M. Levasseur, J. Segret, J. Sorres, T. Hebra,
D. Touboul, V. Eparvier, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 83-95.
[8] M. Levasseur, C. Santerre, J. Segret et al., C. R. Chim., 2023, 26,
97-109.
[9] V. Bohm, T. Michel, E. Forey, V. Agasse, P. Cardinael, M. Chau-
vat, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 111-118.
[10] F. Mondet, D. Beslay, M. Cousin, Y. Le Conte, C. R. Chim., 2023,
26, 119-128.
[11] M. Gibernau, A. Amadori, A. Godschalx, J. Albre, F. Tomi,
P. Marcia, E. Farris, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 129-138.
[12] A. Leconte, N. Barthes, B. Buatois, E. Coutagne, H. Duval,
P. Lucas, M. Staudt, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 139-154.
[13] N. Mouret, V. Tolassy, F.-J. Richard, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 155-
164.
[14] A. Magro, F. Ramon-Portugal, D. Touboul, I. Borges, J.-L.
Hemptinne, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 165-176.
[15] K. Menacer, M. Hervé, B. Lapeyre, M. Vedrenne, A. M. Corte-
sero, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 177-187.
[16] A. Gekière, A. Michel, I. Semay, C. Tourbez, M. Begou,
D. Michez, P. Gerbaux, M. Vanderplanck, C. R. Chim., 2023,
26, 189-203.
[17] L. Berville, C. Lucas, M. Haouzi, A. Khalil, J. Gévar, A.-G.
Bagnères, E. Darrouzet, C. R. Chim., 2023, 26, 205-219.


Guest Editors

Anne-Geneviève Bagnères

Olivier P. Thomas

Foreword: chemical mediation in the environment – Chemical ecology and the French GDR MediatEC

Not a member yet

Bioethanol production from coconut husk using DES-NADES pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis method

Ultrafiltration operational conditions influence in the antibacterial activity of native and thermally treated lysozyme

Review on the contribution of ultrasounds in layered double hydroxides synthesis and in their performances

Indium-catalysed ring opening of 2-hydroxybutyrolactone through the cleavage of C(sp $^3$ )–O bond