Plants Discovered To React To Injury In Manner Similar To Animals

Researchers have discovered something about plants that is said to make them more like animals than previously thought. According to the scientists, when a plant is injured, such as when an insect eats its leaves, defense systems in the plant are raised that can do things like increase noxious chemical production to make the plant taste bad to the insect. The team is clear in stating that the research doesn't indicate that the pants have nerves, but that they do have something similar.

Researchers used fluorescent proteins allowing them to watch signals as they travel through the plant in response to a stressor. Botanist Simon Gilroy says that the team knew there was a systemic signaling system that triggered if a plant was wounded in one place, but science didn't know what was behind that system. The most interesting tidbit is that the scientists weren't even trying to study plant responses to stressors.

What the team was trying to study was how pants respond to gravity by investigating increases in calcium. Botanist Masatsugu Toyota genetically engineered a mustard plant for investigation into the calcium to allow observation in real-time. The protein introduced only fluoresces when calcium is present and then a leaf of the plant was cut to detect calcium changes.

When the leaf was cut waves of light flow from the source of the wound to the rest of the plant at a speed of a millimeter per second. That rate is much slower than nerve cells in animals work, which is up to 120 meters per second. Once the reaction wave hits in the plant, defensive hormones in the damaged region rise.

Scientists think that the trigger for the calcium waves generated from injury might be glutamate. To determine if that was the case, the team also wounded plants that lack glutamate receptors to see if calcium flow was affected, it was. The discovery means that some plants are more complex than previously believed.

SOURCE: ScienceAlert