Plant neuroscience
Plants Found to Show Preferences for Their Relatives - NYTimes.com
Two amazing things here:
- Plants missing photosynthetic enzymes of their own that migrate directionally toward “victim” plants. This behavior has an uncanny resemblance to axon guidance. Make sure to view the time-lapse video in the NYT article. Here’s an image from the PSU website:
- Plants capable of identifying kin and “being nice” to kin while going into a competitive mode of root growth with non-kin. Amazing.
It refreshing to see this kind of interesting behavior without any neurons involved. It makes me think (realize) that the idea of a neuron or a neural system has many components and there might not be any good reason to assume that a single cell must have all of those properties or none of them. Something like a neuron-like cell that’s not a neuron in the classical sense. Anyone know of other examples?
August 14th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Neville, there’s a patch of those same plants on the grounds where I work. Almost but not a symbiotic relationship if one were to ask me to opine. Five jpegs: verdant_1.jpg through verdant_5.jpg can be seen here.