Volatile organic compounds as mediators in plant-herbivore interactions: mechanisms and evolutionary consequences

Plants and herbivorous insects interact through volatile organic compounds (VOCs), chemical signals linking plants with herbivores, their natural enemies, and neighboring plants. These VOC-mediated interactions are crucial for plant defense, growth, and ecosystem balance, underpinning sustainable agriculture and effective pest control. This review critically examines how VOCs mediate plant defenses and herbivore behavior and evaluates their potential in integrated pest management (IPM). We address critical yet often overlooked complexities and knowledge gaps in VOC signaling, aiming to bridge fundamental insights with practical applications to enhance sustainable pest control strategies. The review provides an assessment of VOC-based pest management approaches, such as “push–pull” systems and synthetic VOC lures, highlighting both their potential benefits and inherent limitations. It emphasizes important complexities in VOC signaling: plants may emit “dishonest” stress cues even in the absence of herbivore attack; natural enemies (predators and parasitoids) can habituate to or ignore unreliable VOC cues; and herbivore-induced volatiles frequently overlap with those triggered by other stressors (such as pathogen infection or photooxidative stress), potentially confounding ecological signals. Molecular-level insights into VOC biosynthesis and signaling pathways are integrated with practical perspectives, illustrating how genetic engineering or selective breeding for desirable VOC profiles can enhance crop resistance and bolster biological control. The review concludes by outlining promising future directions, including harnessing synthetic biology to precisely fine-tune VOC emissions and leveraging ecological modeling to optimize the design of VOC-based pest management strategies.