Climate change could help bugs, hurt plants

Higher carbon dioxide levels associated with man-made emissions – generally thought to play into climate change and global warming – appear to make plants, soybeans anyway, more susceptible to insect damage by impairing their chemical defensive systems.

Plants exposed to high carbon dioxide levels in a University of Illinois study lost their ability to produce jasmonic acid, a hormone which starts, when insects attack, a chain of chemical reactions in plant leaves leading to the production of a compound called a protease inhibitor, say UI professors May Berenbaum and Evan DeLucia.

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