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posted by chromas on Saturday July 11 2020, @08:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the toMAYto-toMAHto dept.

Detection of electrical signaling between tomato plants raises interesting questions:

UAH's [University of Alabama in Huntsville] Dr. Yuri Shtessel and Dr. Alexander Volkov, a professor of biochemistry at Oakwood University, coauthored a paper that used physical experiments and mathematical modeling to study transmission of electrical signals between tomato plants.

[...] "Dr. Volkov is a prominent scholar in biochemistry. Once, we were talking about the electrical signal propagation though the plant's stem and between the plants—plant communication—through the soil," Dr. Shtessel says. "I suggested building an equivalent electrical circuit and a corresponding mathematical model that describes these processes."

The mathematical modeling is based on ordinary and partial differential equations. Dr. Shtessel was in charge of building the models, running the simulations and generating the plots.

[...] Plants generate electric signals that propagate through their parts. When the roots of tomatoes are experimentally isolated from each other with an air gap, the electrical impedance of the gap is very large.

"The electrical signals won't go through this gap," Dr. Shtessel says. In that experiment, communication between plants via their roots was prevented, as was discovered by Dr. Volkov.

However, when the plants are living in common soil, experiments conducted by Dr. Volkov found that the ground impedance is not very large and they can communicate by passing electrical signals to each other through the Mycorrhizal network in the soil.

Maybe there is something to the "Tree of Souls" in Avatar?

Journal Reference:
Alexander G. Volkov et al. Underground electrotonic signal transmission between plants [open], Communicative & Integrative Biology (2020). (DOI: 10.1080/19420889.2020.1757207)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:26PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:26PM (#1019481) Journal

    What is not clear to me is whether this sentence is specific about the experimental setup (as in, it is confirmed that the observed communication is not though one of those means, but really is electrical), or if it is indeed a general statement (as in, it is proved that those plants don't communicate at all thorough those other channels).

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:40PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 11 2020, @01:40PM (#1019487) Journal

    Apologies for repeating myself, but "Do RTF-DOI-A".

    Otherwise, the quoted passage says "It proves that the fast electrotonic signal transmission..." (and says nothing about the "Tree of Souls" in Avatar or any other forms of communication, it doesn't even say that they don't exist).

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford