Quantitative and Hierarchical Coordination of Growth and Defence in Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) Under Increasing Tissue Damage.

Increasing mechanical wounding in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) shifts physiology from growth to defence along a graded continuum, with growth and flowering inhibited and defensive traits reinforced proportionally across 0x–10x wounds.

• Why it matters: Plants must balance antagonistic growth and defence under damage, but the quantitative rules and regulatory hierarchy linking stress intensity to coordinated responses remain unclear.
• What they did: Tomato plants were wounded at 0x, 1x, 3x, 5x, and 10x, then assessed with integrated phenotyping, metabolite and hormone measurements, and transcriptomics to map stress-dependent transitions.
• The result: Jasmonic acid (JA) rapidly accumulates at low stress and saturates at moderate intensities, while a conserved JA-associated wound-responsive transcript core is activated across all treatments and additional regulatory layers emerge at higher intensities.

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