PubMed · 2026-03-17
Certain soil microbes, shaped by maize roots releasing natural chemicals called benzoxazinoids, help the next generation of plants grow faster and fight off disease simultaneously — overturning the common assumption that growth and immunity trade off against each other.
Arabidopsis plants grown in benzoxazinoid-conditioned soil showed measurably improved growth and more advanced development compared to controls
The same plants mounted stronger resistance against the fungal pathogen Botrytis cinerea, with enhanced defense gene expression detectable in shoot tissue
Growth and defense improvements occurred simultaneously via defense priming — not a trade-off — challenging the conventional growth-immunity resource conflict model
