Abstract Plants have to overcome different types of environment stress including various insect and pathogen attacks during their life cycle. With long-term evolution, plants have developed sophisticated systems to recognize different biotic attacks and initiate an integrated defense network for survival. On the other hand, pathogens and insects have devised multiple strategies to adapt to their host plants. In the past three decades, substantial progress has been made toward improving the understanding of plant–biotic interactions. An increasing number of active molecules have been identified that not only have functions within an organism but also act as heterogeneous regulators that can migrate across interacting individuals (Kan et al., 2017; Qian et al., 2017). The discovery of new heterogeneous regulators and their mechanisms of migration across interacting organisms is potentially helpful in the development of novel strategies to protect crop plants from biotic threats.