Growth–defense trade-offs in plants

Walking through a garden or a crop field, you may notice that plants damaged by pests (insects or pathogens) look smaller than the same kind of plants nearby that are not damaged. An obvious explanation would be that damaged plants may have lost substantial photosynthetic tissue due to insect and pathogen activities. As such, plants may have a reduced ability to capture light and perform photosynthesis, which fuels the growth of plants. While this is likely part of the reason why damaged plants look smaller, there is also another and perhaps more fascinating explanation that we would like to discuss here in this primer. It turns out that plants attacked by insects, pathogens and other biotic stressors may 'purposely' slow down their growth and that this response is often systemic, meaning that it occurs throughout the plant and beyond the tissue that is damaged by pests. Interestingly, some chemicals or plant genetic mutations that simulate insect or pathogen attacks without causing a loss of photosynthetic tissue can also slow plant growth, suggesting the physical loss of photosynthetic tissue per se is not always a prerequisite for slowing down plant growth. In contrast, there are conditions under which plants need to grow rapidly. For example, plants grow quickly when searching for light during germination or under a shaded canopy due to crowding from neighboring plants. Under these conditions, rapid plant growth is often accompanied by increased susceptibility to pests, presumably because growth is prioritized over defense. This inverse growth-defense relationship is commonly known as the 'growth-defense trade-off' and may be considered one of the most fundamental principles of 'plant economics' that allows plants to adjust growth and defense based on external conditions (Figure 1). As plants must both grow and defend in order to reproduce and survive in the natural world, growth-defense trade-offs have important ecological consequences. In agricultural settings, crops have often been bred to maximize growth-related traits, which could inadvertently result in the loss of useful genetic traits for biotic defenses. Thus, deciphering the molecular mechanisms underlying growth-defense trade-off phenomena could impact future crop breeding strategies aimed at designing superior crop plants with high yields as well as the ability to defend against biotic stressors. Here, we discuss some of the prevailing hypotheses about growth-defense trade-offs, our current understanding of the underlying mechanisms, and the ongoing efforts to optimize growth-defense trade-offs in crop plants.