Frontiers in chemical ecology and coevolution.

There has been tremendous growth in the area of chemical ecology and the study of coevolution. Over the past decade, the pages of New Phytologist have been publishing increasingly important reviews (Strauss et al., 2005; Keeling & Bohlmann, 2006; Heil, 2008; Dudareva et al., 2013) and original studies (Leitner et al., 2005; Agrawal et al., 2009; Huang et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2013) that have advanced our ecological and evolutionary understanding of chemically-mediated interactions. In particular, classic questions on the interactions of plants and herbivores, pollinators, and microbes have been infused with modern chemical and molecular methods, which has enhanced progress. In addition, there continues to be a healthy tension between the use of model and nonmodel study systems in chemical ecology, two ways to make progress on interdisciplinary issues. The good news is that new methods (e.g. genome-wide association mapping) can turn nearly any organism into a ‘model’. As always, issues of chemical ecology stand at the border between advancing knowledge of biodiversity and basic plant biology with that of pest management and maximizing plant production in the face of enemy attack (Fig. 1). It was in this context that the 7NewPhytologistWorkshopwas held in Ithaca, NY, USA early in the autumn of 2013. The workshop, made up of over 30 participants (Fig. 2), was convened by an organizing committee based at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA (Anurag Agrawal, Andr e Kessler, Georg Jander, Robert Raguso, Jennifer Thaler), spanning four departments (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Neurobiology and Behavior, and Entomology). A committee of graduate students and postdoctorates was also central to the planning and implementation of the workshop: Geoffrey Broadhead, Clare Casteel, Mônica Kersch-Becker, Maya Lim, and Marjorie Weber. In addition to funding from the New Phytologist Trust, further support came fromCornell’s University Lectures Committee. In this paper I have highlighted some of the meeting’s major emergent themes and discussions.