Beans use an immune receptor to call in airstrikes on caterpillars

For decades, scientists have understood that plants can release volatile organic compounds—essentially airborne chemical signals—to attract the natural enemies of the things that eat them, like caterpillars. What we didn’t know was exactly how a plant translates the physical act of being eaten into a specific, predator-summoning distress signal. “[One] thing we didn’t know is how the plant detects the caterpillar in the first place,” says Adam Steinbrenner, a biologist at the University of Washi