Long-Distance Signal Transmission in Trees - Communication in Plants: Neuronal Aspects of Plant Life - page 342

23.6
Airborne Flow of Volatile Messengers
Gaseous signal transmission in plants, from ethylene to nitric oxide, has
a long and established history. The gaseous plant hormone ethylene was
described in 1934, but since antiquity the fact that plants emit numerous
volatile compounds from flowers, fruits and vegetative parts that exert ac-
tivity on other organisms has been realized. For example, floral volatiles
serve as attractants for species-specific pollinators, whereas the volatiles
emitted from vegetative parts, especially those released after herbivore
feeding, appear to protect plants by deterring herbivores and by attracting
the enemies of herbivores (Kessler and Baldwin 2001; Pichersky and Ger-
shenzon 2002). Leaves normally release small quantities of volatile chem-
icals, but when a plant is damaged by herbivorous insects, this quantity
rapidly increases. An undamaged plant maintains small levels of volatiles
as a constitutive chemical reserve, which includes monoterpens, sesquiter-
pens and aromatics (Markovic et al. 1996, in Fraxinus ). In contrast, fol-
lowing insect damage, plants release a variety of newly formed volatiles
from the damaged site: the composition of the volatile profile changes,
because of a de novo synthesis. However, these compounds are not stored
in the plant (Paré and Tumlinson 1999), but are quickly released in the
surroundings. The metabolic cost of these phytochemical emissions can
also be high. In particular, terpenoids are more expensive to manufacture
per gram than most other primary and secondary metabolites owing to
the need for extensive chemical reduction (Gershenzon 1994). It appears
that volatiles need to be judiciously synthesized and safely stored, as in-
creased synthesis can be costly and potentially toxic to the plant. However,
decreases in terpene accumulation may make an individual plant more
vulnerable to insect pest attacks or temperature stress. In addition to the
releaseofvolatilesatthesiteofherbivorefeeding,analysisofvolatileemis-
sionsfromunharmedleavesofinsect-damagedplantshasestablishedthat
there is a systemic response. Chemical labelling experiments showed the
systemic volatiles are synthesized at the site of release, suggesting that
a mobile chemical messenger is transported from the damage location to
distal, undamaged leaves to trigger synthesis and volatile release, moving
both acropetally (Jones et al. 1993) and basipetally (Davis et al. 1991). The
observed signal transduction from sink to source leaves leads to the ques-
tionofthenatureofthesystemicsignal.Differentsignaltypeshavebeen
widely proposed, from electrical (Stankovic and Davies 1996), to chemi-
cal (Malone et al. 1994; Malone and Alarcon 1995; Rhodes et al. 1999) to
hydraulic signals (Alarcon and Malone 1994). Recently, for the first time
electrophysiological recordings were performed by Pophof et al. (2005) on
single olfactory sensilla of Cactoblastis cactorum . Eight volatile organic