Author: Susan Milius / Source: Science News
Don’t blame the tomato. Tiny pests called silverleaf whiteflies can make a tomato plant spread deceptive scents that leave its neighbors vulnerable to attach.
Sap-sucking Bemisia tabaci, an invasive menace to a wide range of crops, are definitely insects. Yet when they attack a tomato plant, prompting a silent shriek of scents, the plant starts smelling as if bacteria or fungi have struck instead. Those phony odors prime neighboring tomato plants for an attack, but not from an insect, an international research team found.
Those plants prepare to mount a fast and strong resistance against an incoming pathogen. But that high alert suppresses the plants’ chemistry for resisting insects and “leaves them far more vulnerable to the whiteflies when they arrive,” says Xiao-Ping Yu, an entomologist at China Jiliang University in Hangzhou.
Tomato plants that spent 24 hours in a chamber with just the odor of a major whitefly attack managed to produce only half the surge of an insect-fighter hormone as plants taken by surprise by an insect attack, Yu and colleagues report March 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Plant defense chemistry often poses this one-or-the-other dilemma. To put up a good fight against insects,…
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