About
Why PVD?
Plants, animals, and microbes employ diverse compounds, including VOCs, to perform a variety of interactions and functions. Some plant VOCs function as homing cues for pollinators and seed dispersers (Baldwin 2010; Herrmann 2010), help control herbivores by attracting parasitoids (Baldwin 2010; Herrmann 2010) or mediate plant-plant communications (Baldwin 2010; Komarova et al. 2014). Plants regulate root growth in compacted soil by sensing ethylene accumulation caused by restricted diffusion (Pandey et al. 2021). Ethylene produced by peanut roots increases nutrient availability and seed production by influencing the rhizosphere microbiome (Chen et al. 2020). Animals also produce and recognize specific VOCs as signals. The ability to associate specific VOCs with food, mate, or threats is essential for animal survival, which is why a large family of olfactory receptor genes (~350 in humans and ~1,000 in mice) exist (Buck 2004). Some microbial VOCs suppress other microbes directly via antibiosis or indirectly by inducing plant defense (Caulier et al. 2019; Kang et al. 2021; Piechulla et al. 2017; Quintana-Rodriguez et al. 2018; Tilocca et al. 2020).
However, despite their critical roles, the available knowledge about which VOCs are bioactive and how they work is limited compared to bioactive compounds relying on water for movement. This knowledge deficiency was partly caused by an unintended bias created by experimental design: studies on organismal interactions typically involve physical inoculation with water as the medium, making it difficult to recognize VOC involvement.
PVD aims to help address this deficiency by curating VOC-related data and resources in a searchable form. We often pay inadequate attention to archiving and disseminating new data and resources beyond publication. Consequently, it is not uncommon to encounter missing or unavailable data and materials from previous studies, often fragmenting community work and forcing us to reinvent the wheel. PVD will archive the blueprint and detailed guide for fabricating various tools that can help investigate the function and mechanism of VOCs and tutorials for setting up experiments and data analysis to help others engage in VOC-related research without experiencing trial and error. Besides this knowledge and resource preservation and dissemination to support community research, it also aims to help develop VOC-based tools for sensing and monitoring diseases and anomalies affecting plant growth and health. Since plants release multiple classes of VOCs in response to varying environmental conditions and biotic interactions because these stimuli affect their physiology and metabolism, VOC profiles can serve as indicators for non-invasively diagnosing a wide range of problems.
References
- Baldwin, I. T. 2010. Plant volatiles. Current Biology 20:R392-R397.
- Buck, L. B. 2004. Olfactory Receptors and Odor Coding in Mammals. Nutrition Reviews 62:S184-S188.
- Caulier, S., Nannan, C., Gillis, A., Licciardi, F., Bragard, C., and Mahillon, J. 2019. Overview of the antimicrobial compounds produced by members of the Bacillus subtilis group. Frontiers in Microbiology 10:1-19.
- Chen, Y., Bonkowski, M., Shen, Y., Griffiths, B. S., Jiang, Y., Wang, X., and Sun, B. 2020. Root ethylene mediates rhizosphere microbial community reconstruction when chemically detecting cyanide produced by neighbouring plants. Microbiome 8:4.
- Herrmann, A., ed. 2010. The Chemistry and Biology of Volatiles. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.
- Kang, S., Lumactud, R., Li, N., Bell, T. H., Kim, H., Park, S.-Y., and Lee, Y.-H. 2021. Harnessing chemical ecology for environment-friendly crop protection. Phytopathology 111:1697-1710.
- Komarova, T. V., Sheshukova, E. V., and Dorokhov, Y. L. 2014. Cell wall methanol as a signal in plant immunity. Frontiers in Plant Science 5:101.
- Pandey, B. K., Huang, G., Bhosale, R., Hartman, S., Sturrock, C. J., Jose, L., Martin, O. C., Karady, M., Voesenek, L. A. C. J., Ljung, K., Lynch, J. P., Brown, K. M., Whalley, W. R., Mooney, S. J., Zhang, D., and Bennett, M. J. 2021. Plant roots sense soil compaction through restricted ethylene diffusion. Science 371:276-280.
- Piechulla, B., Lemfack, M. C., and Kai, M. 2017. Effects of discrete bioactive microbial volatiles on plants and fungi. Plant, Cell & Environment 40:2042-2067.
- Quintana-Rodriguez, E., Rivera-Macias, L. E., Adame-Alvarez, R. M., Torres, J. M., and Heil, M. 2018. Shared weapons in fungus-fungus and fungus-plant interactions? Volatile organic compounds of plant or fungal origin exert direct antifungal activity in vitro. Fungal Ecology 33:115-121.
- Tilocca, B., Cao, A., and Migheli, Q. 2020. Scent of a killer: microbial volatilome and its role in the biological control of plant pathogens. Frontiers in Microbiology 11:41-41.
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Support
This platform was initially built using a seed grant from the Penn State Institute for Sustainable Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science (SAFES). The Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) Research Innovations with Scientists and Engineering (RISE) team built the database. Support from the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences and Huck Institutes of Life Sciences helped curate some of the data archived in PVD.