Study
Defense Priming: An Adaptive Part of Induced Resistance
Mauch-Mani, Brigitte; Baccelli, Ivan; Luna, Estrella; Flors, Victor
Annual Review of Plant Biology, 2017
A review of defence priming: the mechanisms by which a prior stimulus leaves a plant able to respond faster and more strongly to a later attack without mounting the full response in advance, including the chromatin and metabolic changes involved and the evidence for inheritance across generations.
- Studied in
- Plantae, Arabidopsis thaliana, Zea mays
- Sample size
- review of priming mechanisms and agricultural application
Priming operates through accumulation of inactive signalling components and through chromatin modifications at defence gene loci, leaving the plant primed at low metabolic cost. Primed states can persist for weeks and in some cases are transmitted to offspring. Deliberate priming of crops is an active agricultural technology, with the trade-off that priming carries a fitness cost when attack does not follow.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Priming is an adaptive strategy balancing the cost of readiness against the cost of a slow response, and is agriculturally exploitable.
How NatureHQ reads it
Priming is the reason plant communication has a real effect to explain at all, and it is more interesting than the alternative would be. A neighbour that detected a volatile and immediately mounted a full defence would be wasting resources on an attack that may never come. What actually happens is cheaper and cleverer: the plant stocks the shelves and waits. That also explains the standard experimental result — an exposed plant does not look different until it is attacked, and then it responds faster. This record additionally closes the agricultural gap NatureHQ had flagged, where deliberate priming is now a commercial practice rather than a curiosity.
- Reviews a field where laboratory effects have often been larger than field effects.
- Transgenerational priming rests on a smaller and more contested evidence base than within-generation priming.
- Costs of priming are demonstrated in some systems and assumed in others.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Annual ReviewsPublished in an Annual Reviews journal.
doi.org/10.1146/annurev-arplant-042916-041132
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-11.