Do Carnivorous plants have a nervous system like humans? This is what a new study says
Have you ever wondered what happens within a Venus Flytrap when it snatches an insect?
This question has piqued the curiosity of many, and now, new bioelectronic technology has provided some insightful answers.
As detailed in Science Advances, this technology has enabled scientists to unlock secrets about the electrical signalling that prompts the carnivorous plant’s trap to close on unsuspecting insects.
This breakthrough technology has facilitated a deeper understanding of how plants, despite lacking a nervous system, generate electrical signals in response to touch and stress stimuli. This is fundamentally different from animals, which have the ability to physically react to stressors. On the other hand, plants are stationary and must manage stressors from their immediate environment.
“There is currently a great need for developing plants that are more stress resistant, for us to be able to grow food and have healthy forests also in the future,” says Eleni Stavrinidou, associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology at Linköping University, Sweden. She believes that understanding plant stress responses, facilitated by this novel technology, will play a crucial role in this mission.
How do plants respond to stress factors?
This study further highlights that some plants, like the Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), exhibit rapid movements correlating with their electrical signals. The plant’s trap features small sensory hairs. When a hair is bent by an external factor, such as an insect, it may prompt the trap to close.
The plant then utilizes an enzyme to decompose the trapped insect, absorbing the nutrients. However, the closure mechanism only activates if the hairs are touched twice within roughly 30 seconds, ensuring energy conservation by avoiding unnecessary closures.
Electrical signalling across various organisms results from voltage differences inside and outside cells, caused by rapid ion movement during stimulation. While this phenomenon is well-understood in animals, the equivalent mechanism in plants remains an area of exploration.
Through this research, the team introduced a state-of-the-art multi-electrode array technology to investigate the emergence and propagation of electrical signals in the Venus Flytrap. This innovative device, akin to a thin film with embedded electrodes, was developed in a collaborative effort between Linköping University and Columbia University.
Previous studies were limited by using only a single measurement point, preventing the accurate identification of the signal’s origin or direction. However, this advanced technology has facilitated comprehensive measurements, yielding previously unseen data.
“We can now say with certainty that the electrical signal originates in the sensory hairs of the Venus Flytrap. With our technology, we can also see that the signal mainly spreads radially from the hair, without any clear direction,” points out Stavrinidou.
The technology also revealed that unstimulated sensory hairs occasionally generate spontaneous signals.
” This is very interesting, and we don’t know yet why this happens or what the function is. One of the most important aspects of this study is that we show that bioelectronic technologies, which are extensively used in biomedical research, can be applied to plant physiology research as well, therefore opening possibilities for new discoveries,” concludes Stavrinidou.
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