Infested tomatoes provide defensive weapons for healthy neighbors
Tuesday, May 6, 2014 - 09:40
in Biology & Nature
(Phys.org) —Plants have chemical defenses against infestation. Sometimes, infested plants release volatile chemicals that signal other, non-infested plants to build up defenses of their own. Koichi Sugimoto and his colleagues at Yamaguchi University in Japan studied this plant-plant signaling system in tomatoes. They found that tomato plants infested with cutworms release a volatile chemical that healthy, neighboring plants use to create a pesticide. The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.