Plants: hide your sugar.

The article reports that German scientists at the Max Planck Institutes in Jena and Potsdam discovered a gene, GAL83, the beta subunit of SNF-1 related kinase in tobacco plant to fight herbivores by allocating carbon to roots. The scientists discovered that expression of GAL83 was substantially reduced in young leaves ravaged by tobacco hornworm larvae, and that silencing of the gene in the leaves resulted in translocating carbon from leaves to roots, the part of the plant which is known to be less prone to disease.