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Lofty Thought of the Day
- Category: Science & Technology
By LiveScience Staff - Plants can't see or hear, but they can recognize their siblings, and now researchers have found out how: They use chemical signals secreted from their roots, according to a new study. Back in 2007, Canadian researchers discovered that a common seashore plant, called a sea rocket, can recognize its siblings – plants grown from seeds from the same plant, or mother. They saw that when siblings are grown next to each other in the soil, they "play nice" and don't send out more roots to compete with one another.
But as soon as one of the plants is thrown in with strangers, it begins competing with them by rapidly growing more roots to take up the water and mineral nutrients in the soil.
Researchers from the University of Delaware wanted to find out how the plants were able to identify their kin.
"Plants have no visible sensory markers, and they can't run away from where they are planted," Harsh Bais, assistant professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Delaware, said in a statement. "It then becomes a search for more complex patterns of recognition."
Bais and doctoral student Meredith Biedrzycki set up a study with wild populations of Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant that is often used as a model organism in plant research.
Harsh Bais, University of Delaware assistant professor of plant and soil sciences, and doctoral student Meredith Bierdrzycki with Arabidopsis plants in the laboratory at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. Credit: University of Delaware.
They wanted to use wild populations instead of laboratory-bred species, because the latter "always has cousins floating around in the lab," Bais said.
In a series of experiments, young seedlings were exposed to liquid containing the root secretions, called "exudates," from siblings, from strangers (non-siblings), or only their own exudates.
Further, when sibling plants grow next to each other, their leaves will often touch and intertwine, while stranger plants near each other grow rigidly upright and avoid touching, the authors say...MORE...
