Plant peptides in defense and signaling

•Knowledge about plant peptides is important in both basic and applied plant research.•Peptides involved in defense belong to multigene families with intriguing evolutionary aspects.•Signaling peptides are encoded by a variety of gene families, and show a degree of functional overlap.•The interactomic approach has identified peptide hubs, connecting recognizable gene clusters.

This review focuses on plant peptides involved in defense against pathogen infection and those involved in the regulation of growth and development. Defense peptides, defensins, cyclotides and anti-microbial peptides are compared and contrasted. Signaling peptides are classified according to their major sites of activity. Finally, a network approach to creating an interactomic peptide map is described.