Abstract

Green leaf volatiles (GLVs) are rapidly released by plant leaves upon damage. This makes them ideal signals to convey the presence of a damaging threat to other parts of the same plant, but also to plants nearby. There, GLVs were first found to activate defense responses against insect herbivores and necrotrophic pathogens. Aside from providing direct protection, GLVs also prime those responses resulting in an enhanced and/or accelerated response to these biotic stressors. Recently, it was shown that GLVs also protect against cold stress in plants, resulting in stress-specific transcript accumulation and subsequent reduced damage. This response was further associated with a stimulation of growth after the stress subsided. Common to all those stresses is that they can also cause the release of these compounds. However, the quantities and qualities of the emitted GLVs can vary significantly even in closely related species, suggesting that eco-physiological factors related to biotic and abiotic stresses rather than systematic relationships may have been the driving force for the highly variable emission of these compounds. Still, too little is known about the regulation of GLV emissions, signaling, and responses to support this hypothesis. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of current knowledge regarding biosynthesis and signaling of GLVs in plants and will give an outlook into future areas of research that may provide essential information about the complex biological activities of these compounds.

Highlights

  • Green leaf volatiles (GLVs), the typical green smell of plants, are released almost instantly after mechanical damage from oxygenated fatty acids in the chloroplasts [1,2,3]

  • While the results from the microarray analysis regarding genes that were involved in the protection of plants against water stress were confirmed by qPCR, we further found that were these gene induced by cold stress, and that priming with GLVs increased the transcript accumulation over the duration of the stress [13]

  • We have shown that GLVs provide significant protection against biotic stresses including insect herbivory

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Summary

Introduction

Green leaf volatiles (GLVs), the typical green smell of plants, are released almost instantly after mechanical damage from oxygenated fatty acids in the chloroplasts [1,2,3]. While aldehydes are directly produced in the damaged tissue, the conversion to the alcohols and their esters requires intact cells [4,5,6]. These compounds were first discovered more than 100 years ago and were mainly considered as metabolic shunts [7]. At the end of the last century these compounds were found to induce genes that were typically associated with defense against insect herbivores [8,9] Their activity was always considered to be low, and it was questioned whether or not these compounds could play a role in the complex defense machinery of plants

Priming of Anti Herbivore Defenses by GLVs
Protection against Cold Stress
The Costs of Priming by GLVs against Biotic and Abiotic Stresses
The Ecological Relevance of GLVs
Conclusions and Outlook
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