Plants know which direction is up, but it was never entirely clear how they know. A brief blurb in the most recent Science summarizes a paper that shows how plants are able to use built-in tilt meters they have in their cells.
Gravity-sensing cells in plants contain tiny grains of starch called statoliths. The orientation of the statoliths changes with the plant's orientation. The gravity-sensing cells respond to even the slightest tilt off of the established plane. Plant statoliths seem to evade the rules of physics that govern other granular materials. In live-cell imaging of young wheat shoots, BĂ©rut et al. observed that statolith piles behave more like slowly creeping liquids than like granular accumulations. The reason is that the individual statoliths are always jiggling around, perhaps because of interactions with the plant cytoskeleton.
Paper reference: 10.1073/pnas.1801895115 (2018)
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday May 22 2018, @03:44PM
It reminds me of otoliths [wikipedia.org] in mammals by description, but the abstract here says the mineral is just deposited on the cell floor and that the sensation mechanism is unknown. Otoliths are detected by hair follicles in the cells to give position data.
This sig for rent.