Fig. 1

Complex interactions may occur between plants and N-acyl homoserine lactones. Integration of available transcriptome results has taken into account following factors: N-acyl homoserine lactone (AHL), time point, and tissue type. The impact of different AHL molecules (A) and their mixture (AHL mix) on A. thaliana has been assessed in several samples including seedlings, root tissues, leaf tissues, and ali1 mutant (von Rad et al. 2008; Schenk et al. 2014; Zhao et al. 2016; Liu et al. 2022; Shrestha et al. 2022; Duan et al. 2023). In order to compare results from different sources, the time point of AHL treatment was set to 0 h. Notably, in some studies, plants pretreated with AHL molecules for 72 h were challenged with 100 nM flg22 for another 2 h (74 h) and 24 h (96 h). The enriched gene ontology (GO) terms with the biggest gene counts were selected as representative for plant responses to AHL molecules (B)