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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)


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by choose another one on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:43PM (1 child)

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:43PM (#1019589)

    Only if we can decode the signals. We have known about tomatoes "screaming" for years, we just don't know what they are saying.

    I really really really want someone to figure this out, mostly because I am gonna love it if their distress call is "vegans are coming", then I am gonna celebrate with filet steak and foie gras - if I can stop laughing for long enough to eat it.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @07:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2020, @07:20PM (#1019635)

    Even if we could start decoding it would take us awhile to ketchup.