NSF grant helps researchers study ways to return plants' defense mechanisms

Humans and animals have a "fight or flight" response to danger, but plants can't flee. They originally had a built-in defense system to protect them from bugs and injuries, but humans cultivated some plants to serve humans' needs; and now some plants can't flee or fight. So costly pesticides that are sometimes harmful to the environment now defend the plants from the same things they used to be able to fight on their own.