Caterpillar-specific defense responses in plants

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Agricultural crops provide food, forages and/or biofuels and may help to mitigate greenhouse gasses by acting as carbon sinks. Remarkably, sessile plants are subject to an vast and diverse arsenal of pests and diseases but manage to circumvent most of these onslaughts. However, when a plant is susceptible to a pest or pathogen, this can result in billions of dollars in damage. Understanding how plants co-ordinate and regulate their defense responses at the transcriptional, protein and metabolite levels is key to developing effective plant protection strategies, through breeding or metabolic engineering, that will lead to sustainable agricultural practices. Global cellular master regulators, which co-ordinate multiple pathways and are involved in controlling the endogenous plant defense response, provide a great opportunity to understand plant cellular regulation and provide tools to improve plant protection.