New study confirms communication between tomato plants ...
https://trustmyscience.com/signalisatio ... ressantes/The electrical signaling detected between tomato plants raises interesting questions
Did you know that plants communicate with each other? Indeed, they emit and analyze signals (which are not audible), called silent. Today, a new study is shedding light on these electrical signals sent from one plant to another, and the interesting questions that this raises.
It was Dr. Yuri Shtessel, a distinguished professor emeritus of the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) and Dr. Alexander Volkov, professor of biochemistry at the University of Oakwood, who co-authored an article based on physical experiences as well as a mathematical modeling to study the transmission of electrical signals between tomato plants.
You should know that Dr. Shtessel's specialty is control engineering, and control algorithms are widely applicable in all disciplines (for example in the control of aerospace vehicles). At Oakwood, Dr. Volkov studied the propagation of electrical signals inside a plant and also between plants through a network of mycorrhizal fungi ubiquitous in the soil, which seem to act as real circuits. The two researchers collaborated for the first time in 2017.
“Dr. Volkov is a distinguished specialist in biochemistry. Once we were talking about the propagation of the electrical signal through the plant stem and between plants - that is, the communication between plants - through the soil, ”says Dr. Shtessel. "I suggested building an equivalent electrical circuit and a corresponding mathematical model that describes these processes," he added.
This mathematical modeling is based on ordinary and partial differential equations. Dr. Shtessel was responsible for building the models, running the simulations and generating the plots. "What benefits could we derive from mathematical modeling of communication processes? He asked. "The answer is very simple: we can use the mathematical model to simulate the processes studied on a computer instead of performing long and costly experiments," he explained.
In botany, communication in plants (also called plant communication, or plant communication) is not a thoughtful act (like human communication), but involves in the emitting plant a plastic and conditional emission of the signal according to stimuli environmental, associated with a rapid response from the recipient organism. In fact, plants generate electrical signals which propagate through them.
In this specific case, when the tomato roots are experimentally isolated from each other with an air space between them, the electrical impedance of the space is very large. "The electrical signals will not pass through this space," says Shtessel. Indeed, in this experiment, communication between plants via their roots was prevented, as Volkov discovered.
However, when plants live in common soil, experiments by Dr. Volkov have revealed that the impedance of the soil is not very large, and that they can communicate by transmitting electrical signals to each other through the mycorrhizal network in ground. "We have studied, experimentally and analytically, through simulations, the communication network between two plants only," said Shtessel.
Tomato research, which has focused on the experimental study and mathematical modeling of the propagation of the electrical signal between plants of the same species, opens new doors to the following question: do plants communicate between them (between different species) through mushrooms? "I think it is entirely possible that the signals can propagate through the root network and propagate in common soil or soil from a tomato plant to, say, an oak. The ground plays the role of a conductor, ”says Shtessel.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the nature of the messages sent is unknown and the possibility of cognition was beyond the scope of the experiment. But according to Shtessel, these are extremely interesting questions. "No study of cognitive processing of electrical signals transmitted and received by plants has been done to date," he says. “But another problem is to study the communications of plants via electric waves in the air. It is a totally different story, which has not yet been studied in depth, ”he added.