Frontalin is a naturally occurring organic compound. It is a terpenoid and acetal that functions as a pheromone in bark beetles and elephants.
Frontalin is a naturally occurring organic compound. It is a terpenoid and acetal that functions as a pheromone in bark beetles and elephants.
== Occurrence == left|thumb|Asian elephant in Laos Frontalin acts as an insect pheromone in bark beetles of the genus Dendroctonus, including Dendroctonus frontalis (Southern Pine Beetle) and Dendroctonus brevicomis (Western Pine Beetle), as well as the Mountain Pine Beetle. The biologically active form is predominantly (-)-frontalin. However, (+)-frontalin also occurs in some cases. In Dendroctonus frontalis, the female mainly produces (-)-frontalin, the male mainly (+)-frontalin. In Dendroctonus rufipennis the distribution is reversed.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).