State of the field
Plant Electrophysiology
Plants use electrical and calcium signals to sense touch and injury and send alarms across their tissues.
Maturity
Emerging
Overview reviewed
Where things stand
Plants have no nerves, but they generate action potentials and slower "variation potentials". Electrical activity in the Venus flytrap was recorded as early as 1873. The trap's snapping depends on counting touch-triggered action potentials.
Recent advances
- Wound signalling. Glutamate receptor-like (GLR) channels are needed to spread electrical signals from a wounded leaf to distant leaves and switch on defences (Mousavi et al., Nature, 2013).
- Seeing the signal. Real-time imaging showed that glutamate released at a wound triggers a calcium wave that travels through the plant's vascular system within minutes (Toyota et al., Science, 2018).
What is contested
How plants encode specific information in electrical signals, beyond simple alarm, is unresolved, and claims of plant "intelligence" outrun the evidence.
What to watch
Plant-wearable sensors for agriculture, the decoding of stimulus-specific electrical signatures, and links between electrical signalling and crop stress tolerance.
Milestones
- 1873Electrical signals in a plant. John Burdon-Sanderson records electrical activity in the Venus flytrap when its trigger hairs are touched. This is the first clear evidence that plants use electrical signalling.
- 2018Watching a plant's alarm signal travel. Real-time imaging shows that glutamate released at a wound triggers a fast calcium wave that travels through a plant's vasculature to distant leaves and switches on defences.
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