All living beings need to communicate. Communication builds relationships by allowing us to share our experiences, needs, and wants. Therefore, communication is at the core of our lives. Communication is vital to any community’s health and structure because it allows us to express thoughts, share feelings, and spread information. Communication can occur in many ways, including verbal, written, and other nonverbal modes. The latter is employed by plants, which emit chemicals and perceive chemicals in their surroundings. Although much is being discovered about how plants emit volatile chemicals to communicate with other plants, there is a lack of understanding of how plants perceive these signals from different species. Our proposed research aims to fill this critical knowledge gap by investigating the deadly relationship occurring between tomato plants and dodder, a parasitic plant. Through yet unknown mechanisms, dodder perceives volatiles emitted in the air by tomato. This phenomenon allows dodder to direct its growth towards the tomato plant to eventually latch onto its stem and suck out its vital juices. The dodder-tomato relationship represents an exquisite system to discover how plants perceive volatiles, which will lead to an understanding of how plants communicate with each other and structure their ecosystems. We will pursue the ingenious hypothesis that disrupting dodder’s ability to respond to the host’s attractants will help to identify the components necessary for volatile-based communication among plants, including the direct receptors for volatiles. Our team of investigators with expertise in genomics, robotics, mathematical modeling, and chemical ecology has laid out a plan based on the identification of volatiles and their targeted dispensation, as well as the implementation of genomics and mathematical modeling, to isolate and characterize mutated dodder plants that are unable to sense the tomato scent. Molecular characterization of these mutants will lead to the discovery of the sensory machinery necessary for dodder to attack tomatoes. Accomplishing our research will define the mechanisms underlying plant-plant communication, establish innovative principles to build climate-resilient ecosystems, and set the ground for technological and intellectual foundations to analyze interspecies volatile-based communication across the plant kingdom.