VI
how the specific drugs and toxins, which we have focused on in the first chapters, are
produced by secondary biosynthetic pathways in plants. This provides a glance into the
rich, colourful and almost unlimited world of secondary metabolites that plants are
capable of making.
It is the intention of our lecture and this textbook to teach molecular signalling pathways
in animals and biosynthesis pathways in plants that every Master of Biology student
should have heard of and to illustrate how these topics are connected. We want to do this
in such a way that some immediate everyday relevance becomes obvious. Moreover,
while preparing this material, we ourselves realized how ingeniously plants and animals
exchange messages. We therefore would like to inspire future biologists and biochemists
to take a closer look and study the interactions between the life of plants and animals.
This should bring together forthcoming generations of plant and animal biologists and
enhance our view of inseparability of all life forms on this earth.
Angelika Böttger
Munich, Germany
Ute Vothknecht
Bonn, Germany
Cordelia Bolle
Munich, Germany
Alexander Wolf
Neuherberg, Germany
Preface