It has been found that plants respond to wounds in the same way as animals

Researchers have discovered something about plants that makes them more animal-like than previously thought. According to scientists, when a plant is injured, for example when an insect eats its leaves, defense systems are produced in the plant, which can increase harmful chemical production to make the taste of the bad plant for the insect. The team makes it clear that research does not indicate that pants have nerves, but that they have something similar.

The researchers used fluorescent proteins to monitor the signals as they pass through the plant in response to a stressor. Botanist Simon Gilroy says the team knew that a systemic warning system was triggered if a plant was injured in one place, but science did not know what was behind this system. The most interesting point is that scientists have not even tried to study the reactions of plants to stressors.

What the team was trying to study, is how the pants react to gravity by studying the increase of calcium. Botanist Masatsugu Toyota genetically modified a mustard-based plant to study calcium for real-time observation. The introduced protein fluoresces only when calcium is present, and then a leaf of the plant has been cut off to detect calcium changes.

When the leaf has been cut off, waves of light run from the source of the wound to the rest of the plant at the rate of one millimeter per second. This rate is much slower than that of nerve cells in animals, which can reach 120 meters per second. Once the wave of reaction hits the plant, the defensive hormones in the damaged area increase.

Scientists believe that glutamate is the trigger for calcium waves generated by wounds. To determine if this was the case, the team also injured plants lacking glutamate receptors to see if the calcium flux was affected. The discovery means that some plants are more complex than previously thought.

SOURCE: ScienceAlert