Costs of defense are central to our understanding of interactions between organisms and their environment, and defensive phenotypes of plants have long been considered to be constrained by trade-offs that reflect the allocation of limiting resources. Recent advances in uncovering signal transduction networks have revealed that defense trade-offs are often the result of regulatory "decisions" by the plant, enabling it to fine-tune its phenotype in response to diverse environmental challenges. We place these results in the context of classic studies in ecology and evolutionary biology, and propose a unifying framework for growth-defense trade-offs as a means to study the plant's allocation of limiting resources. Pervasive physiological costs constrain the upper limit to growth and defense traits, but the diversity of selective pressures on plants often favors negative correlations at intermediate trait levels. Despite the ubiquity of underlying costs of defense, the current challenge is using physiological and molecular approaches to predict the conditions where they manifest as detectable trade-offs.

中文翻译：

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植物生长与昆虫食草防御之间的权衡：一种新兴的机制合成

防御成本是我们理解生物与其环境之间相互作用的核心，长期以来，植物的防御表型被认为受到反映有限资源分配的权衡的约束。揭示信号转导网络的最新进展表明，防御权衡通常是植物监管“决定”的结果，使其能够微调其表型以应对各种环境挑战。我们将这些结果置于生态学和进化生物学经典研究的背景下，并提出了一个统一的生长防御权衡框架，作为研究植物对有限资源分配的一种手段。普遍的生理成本限制了生长和防御特性的上限，但植物选择压力的多样性往往有利于中间性状水平的负相关。尽管防御的潜在成本无处不在，但当前的挑战是使用生理和分子方法来预测它们表现为可检测的权衡的条件。