Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface to the second edition
- Acknowledgments
- List of SI prefixes
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Animals in a chemical world
- 2 Methods for identifying and studying semiochemicals
- 3 Pheromones, chemical cues, and sexual selection
- 4 Coming together and keeping apart: aggregation pheromones and host-marking pheromones
- 5 Territorial behavior and semiochemicals
- 6 Semiochemicals and social organization
- 7 Pheromones and recruitment communication
- 8 Fight or flight: alarm pheromones and cues
- 9 Perception and response to chemical communication: from chemosensory receptors to brains, behavior, and development
- 10 Finding the source: pheromones and orientation behavior
- 11 Breaking the code: illicit signalers and receivers of semiochemicals
- 12 Using semiochemicals: applications of pheromones
- 13 On the scent of human attraction: human pheromones?
- Appendix An introduction to chemical terms for non-chemists
- References
- List of Credits
- Index
2 - Methods for identifying and studying semiochemicals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface to the second edition
- Acknowledgments
- List of SI prefixes
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 Animals in a chemical world
- 2 Methods for identifying and studying semiochemicals
- 3 Pheromones, chemical cues, and sexual selection
- 4 Coming together and keeping apart: aggregation pheromones and host-marking pheromones
- 5 Territorial behavior and semiochemicals
- 6 Semiochemicals and social organization
- 7 Pheromones and recruitment communication
- 8 Fight or flight: alarm pheromones and cues
- 9 Perception and response to chemical communication: from chemosensory receptors to brains, behavior, and development
- 10 Finding the source: pheromones and orientation behavior
- 11 Breaking the code: illicit signalers and receivers of semiochemicals
- 12 Using semiochemicals: applications of pheromones
- 13 On the scent of human attraction: human pheromones?
- Appendix An introduction to chemical terms for non-chemists
- References
- List of Credits
- Index
Summary
Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.
Sydney Brenner (2002)Since Butenandt’s landmark identification in 1959 of the silk moth sex pheromone bombykol, there have been spectacular developments in our ability to identify semiochemicals (Meinwald 2009). In their work over some two decades, Butenandt’s team needed more than 10 metric tonnes of female moths, providing 500,000 pheromone glands from which they extracted ~12 mg of the pheromone to identify (Billen 2006; Butenandt et al. 1959). The identification of the first ant trail pheromone in 1971 still required 3.7 kg of Atta texana ants (Tumlinson et al. 1971).
Today, it is possible to work with far, far less than a single moth’s pheromone gland. The revolution has come from chromatographic techniques in particular and the direct coupling of these with mass spectrometers, and other detection devices including animals’ own sensors. The ever-increasing power of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has made complete structure determination (though perhaps not complete stereochemistry) possible on a microgram scale (Meinwald 2009). Insect pheromone identifications can be made from picogram to femtogram quantities, using gas chromatography–electroantennogram detector (GC-EAD, with the insect’s antenna) to get retention indices, and microchemical reactions to determine presence/absence of functional groups (e.g., with a gall midge sex pheromone, Gries et al. 2002).
- Type
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- Information
- Pheromones and Animal BehaviorChemical Signals and Signatures, pp. 49 - 64Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014