This is how a Venus Flytrap knows it is time to close

Regarding plants, Venus Flytraps is quite hardcore. After having attracted its prey with a fruity perfume and trapping it inside its leaves, the spit slowly digests the insect for 5 to 12 days, releasing the empty ball after its meal. But the exact molecular mechanism behind this behavior had been a mystery for scientists – so far.

In a communication document of nature published today, Japanese researchers report that an ion channel at the base of the hairy sensors of a Flytrap acts as an amplifier to probe an alarm at the factory scale to close its trap. To be clear, scientists had a decent idea of ​​how Venus Flytrap could distinguish between real prey and false signals, as well as the anatomy of the tiny hair sensors detecting these signals. However, it was not clear how a plant without a nervous system could convert a physical stimulus into a biological signal.

The history of handkerchief science

Given its strange charisma, it is not surprising that Venus Flytrap is very attention from the scientific community. For example, a 2016 study confirmed that Venus Flytrap “counts” the number of stimulation it receives and closes its trap only when the stimuli pass a certain threshold. Another article of 2020 by Hiraku Suda, the main author of the new study, revealed that fluctuations in calcium concentrations acted like the factory’s short -term memory bank.

The rich literature helped researchers identify where scientists lacked in their understanding of Venus Flytrap. For the new study, the team designed UNCLAT as the crowds with a fluorescent protein to record the movement of different signals inside the plant.

When they gently fold the plant, they noticed a peak in the concentration of calcium ions, in addition to a small electric signal. A stronger push, on the other hand, sparked a larger reaction which transported calcium ions and electrical signals throughout the plant, according to the document.

“Our approach allowed us to visualize the moment when a physical stimulus is converted into a biological signal in living plants,” said Suda, a biologist of the University of Saitama in Japan, in a press release.

A delicate system

A more in -depth examination of the signals revealed that sensory hair consisted in fact of two different types of cells. The withdrawn cells converted physical stimuli into calcium signals, while the adjacent and surrounding cells transported and propagated these signals throughout the plant, but only if the initial stimulus was strong enough.

To see what would happen without these cells, the researchers destroyed the cells behind on the hair of the fly and compared their responses to those of the intact fly traps. There was a certain variability in which the side of the hair was handicapped, but in general, the fly hats with faulty cells were less likely to react to the stimuli, including a colony of ants that scientists had walked near the betrayals.

The new work demonstrates the sophisticated but delicate nature of Flytrap’s biology, which detects “even the weakest and barely grazed contacts,” said Suda. In addition, such mechanossense systems – the ability of a plant to respond to the touch – can be “shared” beyond the male, which suggests that it happens much more with the plants that we could not have imagined.