Plants Retaliating Defense Strategies against Herbivores

Every organism including plants possesses their own shield of protection to survive on this earth. They perform every effort against pathogens resistance, tolerance, and even multiple secretions to defend themselves. Plants exploit physical defense as primitive line of defense where plant structural parts play significant role such as thorns, prickles, and trichomes. However, the acute, active, and spontaneous defense mechanism initiated by the plants in response to attack of external pathogen is chemical defense. Within this, various plant as well as pathogen derived elicitor’s, employ their duty as signal recognizer, receiver and as transferor to the plant defense system. Elicitor’s triggers synthesis and secretion of secondary metabolites which causes the extensive ditch toward herbivory. A plethora of secondary metabolites can directly affect the herbivores or indirectly encounter the pathogen by attracting predators of them belonging to above trophic levels, which unintentionally rescues the plant. These natural chemical compounds such as terpenoids, lipases, glucosinolates, cyanogenic glycosides, polypeptides, and fatty acid conjugates can be anti-nutritive or toxic to herbivore pathogens which minimize their fecundity, growth, and even survival.