A combined defense of different chemical defense substances could result in a negative interaction and mutual detoxification, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in a new study, appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on the wild tobacco species Nicotiana attenuata and one of its specialized herbivores. Chemical analyses of frass revealed that larvae of the tobacco hawkmoth Manduca sexta are able to split off components of one defense substance and use them to detoxify another. However, tobacco plants have also developed a counter-strategy to minimize the mutual detoxification of their defenses: They avoid producing the two substances involved in detoxification simultaneously in high concentrations.
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Source: Phys.org