The emission of VOCs from vegetative plant organs is often induced by biotic stresses like insect herbivory [ 3, 4].
There is a dire need for rapid real-time high-throughput genomic mapping and molecular marker identification tool for isolation of quantitative trait loci, and thereby designing crops with stress, insect, and drought tolerance [7].
Additionally we investigated whether D. mutila alters the competitive ability of I. deltoidea under biotic stress (insect attack).
The data includes genes found to be specifically- or highly-expressed in stems and also in leaves under four different stress conditions (drought and salt stress, insect herbivory and bacterial infection).
The number of reads per gene was counted in each of the 454-sequencing outputs derived from the salt stress, water stress, insect herbivory and bacterial infection treatments and also from stem tissue (runs 5 and 6).
The digital expression profiling analysis performed for A. hypochondriacus identified a total of 1,971 differentially expressed genes in response to at least one of the four stress treatments tested (i.e. water stress, salt stress, insect herbivory and bacterial infection) (Additional file 6).
Ms. Peters stresses that insects are already a major source of protein elsewhere in the world.
Many commercial crops are susceptible to natural stresses — diseases, insects, drought, temperature extremes — and genes from tougher wild relatives can make them more robust.
The insect cuticle plays an important role in protection against environmental stress (Neven 2000; Benoit 2010), and CPs have been shown to accumulate during exposure to various stresses in insects (Benoit 2010), including aphids (Nguyen et al. 2009).
However, productivity still remains far below the potential due to several factors, including periodic drought, high incidence of biotic stresses (diseases, insect-pests and parasitic weeds), poor soil fertility, scarcity of irrigation water, and inadequate farmer access to affordable quality seeds and fertilizers.
