Weedy plant species that have evolved resistance to herbicides due to enhanced metabolic capacity to detoxify herbicides (metabolic resistance) are a major issue. Metabolic herbicide resistance in weedy plant species first became evident in the 1980s in Australia (in Lolium rigidum) and the United Kingdom (in Alopecurus myosuroides) and is now increasingly recognized in several crop-weed specie...

This study investigated the dynamics of parasitism, host plant resistance, pathogens, and predation on the demography of wheat stem sawfly, Cephus cinctus Norton (Hymenoptera: Cephidae), developing in susceptible (hollow stem) and resistant (solid stem) wheat hosts. This study is also the first to investigate the prevalence and impact of cannibalism on wheat stem sawfly mortality. Wheat stem sa...

Herbivore-induced plant volatiles affect the systemic response of plants to local damage and hence represent potential plant hormones. These signals can also lead to "plant-plant communication," a defense induction in yet undamaged plants growing close to damaged neighbors. We observed this phenomenon in the context of disease resistance. Lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus) plants in a natural popula...

Integrated pest management has historically placed great hopes on host plant resistance. However, conventional host-plant resistance to insects involves quantitative traits at several loci. As a result, the progress has been slow and difficult to achieve. With the advent of genetic transformation techniques, it has become possible to clone and insert genes into the crop plants to confer resista...

For many years, plant pathology was divided into two schools of thought. It was clear that purified molecules or crude extracts from microbes or plants (referred to as general elicitors) could induce activation of general defense responses (Boller, 1995). Geneticists instead were studying plant resistance triggered by the recognition of a given pathogen Avirulence gene product by the correspond...

For many years, plant pathology was divided into two schools of thought. It was clear that purified molecules or crude extracts from microbes or plants (referred to as general elicitors) could induce activation of general defense responses (Boller, 1995). Geneticists instead were studying plant resistance triggered by the recognition of a given pathogen Avirulence gene product by the correspond...

Successful management of plant diseases is mainly dependent on the accurate and efficient detection of plant pathogens, amount of genetic and pathogenic variability present in a pathogen population, development of disease resistant cultivars and deployment of effective resistance genes in different epidemiological regions. Beside conventional methods of pathogen detection and breeding resistant...

Plants can resist herbivore damage through three broad mechanisms: antixenosis, antibiosis and tolerance(1). Antixenosis is the degree to which the plant is avoided when the herbivore is able to select other plants(2). Antibiosis is the degree to which the plant affects the fitness of the herbivore feeding on it(1).Tolerance is the degree to which the plant can withstand or repair damage caused...

In nature, herbivorous insects and plant pathogens are generally abundant when plants are flowering. Thus, plants face a diversity of attackers during their reproductive phase. Plant responses to one attacker can interfere with responses to a second attacker, and phytohormones that orchestrate plant reproduction are also involved in resistance to insect and pathogen attack. We quantified phytoh...