ABSTRACT
Emission of PVOCs is specic to species, cultivar/genotype, organ, environment, and occasion. What is the nature of PVOCs for emitter plants? First, PVOCs are needed for wasting excess carbon in the plant body and/or adjusting their health conditions to adapt to rigorous environmental changes, as homeotherms likely do so by sweating. Otherwise, immobile plants prefer to use volatiles that can release chemicals far away to communicate with organisms including insects, microorganisms, and conspecic plants. In fact, in ancient times, hydrophobic aroma compounds developed in brown algae as pheromones that facilitated the mating process of most brown algae during sexual reproduction (Pohnert and Boland 2002). One of the world’s most ancient terrestrial plants, the cosmopolitan moss Bryum argenteum, also makes use of a sex-specic blend of PVOCs to attract moss-dwelling microarthropods for sexual reproduction, similarly to the use observed in a scent-based vascular plant-pollinator relationship (Rosenstiel et al. 2012). Nowadays, individual PVOCs and/or combinations of their blend, released from most parts of the plant taxa, special organs (e.g., oral tissues), and circumstances (e.g., stressed foliage and underground roots) provide a broad perspective of ecological communication as it occurs in real time in nature.
