Professor of Plant Evolutionary Ecology and Director of the Botanical Garden at JGU receives EUR 1.5 million in EU funding
8 September 2026
Meret Huber, Professor of Plant Evolutionary Ecology and Director of the Botanical Garden at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The grant will provide EUR 1.5 million in EU funding over five years. Huber will receive the funding for her project Plant Metabolites as Keystone Traits (METABOKEY), in which she will investigate how plant metabolites influence interactions among species and thereby shape entire ecological communities. Through its Starting Grants, the ERC supports outstanding early-career researchers at the beginning of their independent careers.
"We are delighted by Meret Huber's success and warmly congratulate her," stated JGU President Professor Georg Krausch. "The ERC Starting Grant recognizes the outstanding research achievements of Huber and her research group and further strengthens the life sciences at JGU."
METABOKEY – Plant Metabolites as Keystone Traits
Plants produce an enormous diversity of compounds. Some serve as nutrients, while others protect plants against herbivores or influence how they interact with other organisms. Plant compounds can therefore shape not only how individual plants grow and defend themselves, but also which species occur in an ecosystem and how they interact. Yet how far the effects of plant compounds extend remains largely unknown. Can changes in plant metabolism trigger a chain reaction that spreads through an entire food web and even influences how other species evolve over generations? METABOKEY addresses these questions, which are becoming increasingly relevant: climate change, invasive species, modern breeding, and genetic engineering are altering the compounds that plants produce – with consequences for ecosystems that remain difficult to predict.
To investigate these relationships, Huber's research group is building a controlled aquatic food web centered on the giant duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza). This small floating plant is particularly well suited for the project because the researchers can genetically modify its metabolism and then study, under controlled conditions, how other aquatic organisms respond. The researchers will generate duckweed plants with two contrasting metabolic strategies: plants that produce higher levels of defensive compounds and plants that store more nutrients. They will then investigate how these changes affect algae that compete with duckweed for light and nutrients, as well as snails and water fleas that feed on the duckweed and algae, respectively. The JGU Botanical Garden will support the project in establishing and maintaining the experimental ecosystems.
METABOKEY combines approaches that have rarely been used together: plant synthetic biology, chemical analysis, experimental ecology, evolutionary research, and mathematical modelling. This combination allows the researchers to modify plant metabolism in a targeted manner and track how these changes affect the system from individual molecules to the entire food web. The project thus aims to answer a fundamental question: Can certain plant compounds act as "keystone traits" and thereby determine how entire ecological communities are structured and how they change over generations? The findings could help us better predict what happens to ecosystems when climate change, invasive species, or new crop varieties alter plant metabolism.