By Ashley Stender | August 26, 2026

C-SPIRIT researchers are working to identify plant metabolites and chemical traits that may play important roles in resilience. For Andrea Glassmire, Assistant Professor of Chemical Ecology at Michigan State University, C-SPIRIT’s focus makes the Center a natural fit because her lab studies how plant chemistry shapes interactions among plants, insects, and their environments.

“Plants don’t move,” Glassmire says. “How plants interact with the world around them is through their chemistry.”

Within C-SPIRIT, the Glassmire Lab brings that chemical ecology perspective to C-SPIRIT’s compound research, biological interpretation, and the tomato crop pipeline. Their work helps researchers ask what promising plant compounds do in ecological settings, including how they affect insects, behave in field conditions, and contribute to resilience. While much of the lab’s research focuses on plant-insect interactions in agricultural systems, the same perspective also informs broader questions about plant defense, pest management, invasive species, and restoration.

Candidate Compounds in Ecological Context

Once a promising compound or chemical pattern emerges, Glassmire is interested in how it functions in the plant’s environment. A compound associated with drought response, pest resistance, or plant defense may look important on its own, but its role depends on the other compounds, organisms, and conditions around it.

Overlapping stresses make ecological context especially important. When plants are drought stressed, Glassmire explains, they can become more vulnerable to pathogens and pests, creating what she describes as “a negative cycle with the drought.”

“You can’t just look at one compound,” Glassmire says. “What I’ve really found is that it’s a synergy of compounds. We have some major players, like abscisic acid, but those are phytohormones that are the beginning of biosynthetic pathways that produce a bunch of compounds. It’s really thinking about the suite of compounds, or the combination of compounds.”

For C-SPIRIT, discovery is only the first step. Researchers also need to understand the pathways, interactions, and biological contexts that determine whether a compound matters for resilience.

From Chemical Traits to Field Relevance

Glassmire takes a trait-based approach to plant ecology, focusing on chemistry as a link between plant processes and ecological interactions.

“A lot of the measurements that we see are yield or biomass,” Glassmire says. “That’s the outcome, but what is the mechanism driving that outcome?”

In plant-insect interactions, chemistry helps explain what an insect actually encounters. Genes may regulate plant defenses, but insects respond to the plant’s chemical profile, including compounds and odors that affect feeding, attraction, deterrence, and performance. For C-SPIRIT, this helps connect candidate compounds with the biological effects they produce.

Pairing chemical analysis with insect response tests can help researchers ask whether a compound or chemical pattern changes behavior, toxicity, or plant performance. Controlled experiments can reveal important patterns, but agricultural systems include variables that are difficult to isolate, from temperature and water availability to pest pressure and insect communities.

“You can go so far in a lab and in a greenhouse, but once you put it into the field setting, everything changes, because there are all these variables you can’t control for,” Glassmire says.

Tomato in a Multi-Crop Center

C-SPIRIT’s crop pipelines give researchers a way to ask related questions across different plant systems while still recognizing the biology of each crop. For the Glassmire Lab, tomato and related Solanum systems provide a focused place to study how chemical traits influence herbivore behavior, plant defense, and potential pest-management strategies.

Glassmire also emphasizes that closely related crops cannot simply be treated as interchangeable.

“Plants are different,” Glassmire says. “Potatoes have very different heat tolerances, for example, compared to tomato, and they also have different pests, probably different pathogens, and different chemicals in their plants.”

In tomato, candidate compounds can move from chemical discovery into experiments that test their effects on the plant and on insect responses.

“It is really interdisciplinary,” she says. “It is really trying to go from molecular to the field.”

Although tomato is the main C-SPIRIT anchor for the Glassmire Lab, her broader research shows that these questions extend beyond one crop. Whether in an agricultural field, an invasive plant population, or a restored wetland, plant chemistry can influence how species interact and how ecosystems respond to change.

Toward Resilient Agroecosystems

For Glassmire, the end goal is not a crop that never encounters stress or pests. It is a crop that can keep functioning when those pressures are part of the system. That distinction is central to how her lab approaches chemical ecology within C-SPIRIT.

“When I was younger, I thought we had to have plants with no insects,” Glassmire says. “But that’s not really the key goal in plant resistance. The goal is tolerance of a plant.”

By bringing insects, field conditions, and ecological interactions into the conversation, the Glassmire Lab helps C-SPIRIT ask which chemical traits can support resilience in the agricultural systems where they would need to perform.