Immature leaves are the dominant volatile sensing organs of maize

Plants perceive herbivory induced volatiles and respond to them by upregulating their defenses. So far, the organs responsible for volatile perception remain poorly described. Here, we show that responsiveness to the herbivory induced green leaf volatile (Z)-3-hexenyl acetate (HAC) in terms of volatile emission, transcriptional regulation and jasmonate defense hormone activation is largely constrained to younger maize leaves. Older leaves are much less sensitive to HAC. In a given leaf, responsiveness to HAC is high at immature developmental stages and drops off rapidly during maturation. Responsiveness to the non-volatile elicitor ZmPep3 shows an opposite pattern, demonstrating that this form of hyposmia (i.e. decreased sense of smell) is not due to a general defect in jasmonate defense signaling in mature leaves. Neither stomatal conductance nor leaf cuticle composition explain the unresponsiveness of older leaves to HAC, suggesting perception mechanisms upstream of jasmonate signalin..., Data were collected as described in the manuscript. All data were saved as Microsoft Excel Comma Separated Values Files. , All data were processed with Rstudio. Necessary information for data anslysis is either documented in the R code attached or self contained in the csv files.