Integrative statistical methods for decoding molecular responses to insect herbivory in Nicotiana attenuata This work focuses on the development of statistical methods to select features (genes and metabolites) exhibiting induced local and systemic defense responses to insect attack in Nicotiana attenuata along with the extraction of additional information regarding their timing of action. To characterize the dynamics of activation in time and space of herbivory induced responses I designed a framework by combining methods previously developed for feature selection and extraction to identify activated network motifs. These motifs are the set of features that are differentially perturbed in local and systemic tissues in response to herbivory. ...