sunflowers always face the sun As the king passes through the star sky. So how do these plants know where the Sun will follow them? The research was conducted by plant biologists at the University of California at Davis (USA). PLOS BiologyIt reveals that they use a completely unknown mechanism that is different from what was thought until now.
“This “This was a complete surprise to us.”Stacey Harmer, professor of Plant Biology at UC Davis and lead author of the paper, admitted as much.
Most plants show phototropism, that is, the ability to grow in the direction of a light source. Plant scientists had hypothesized that sunflowers’ heliotropism, the ability to follow the sun, would rely on the same basic mechanism, governed by a molecule called phototropin and responding to light at the blue end of the spectrum. However, it turned out that this was not the case.
During the day, sunflowers grow a little more on the east side of the stem (thus tilting their ‘head’ towards the west), and at night they grow a little more on the west side and move their tops, so the head turns east.
Harmer’s lab at the UC Davis School of Biological Sciences has previously shown how sunflowers use their internal circadian clocks to predict sunrise and coordinate the opening of flowers with the arrival of pollinating insects in the morning.
In the new study, graduate student Christopher Brooks, postdoctoral researcher Hagatop Atamian, and Harmer examined which genes were activated. sunflowers grown in laboratory growth chambers and sunflowers grown in outdoor sunlight.
This is not phototropism
Sunflowers planted indoors grew directly into light, activating phototropin-related genes. However Plants grown outdoors and moved with the sun showed a completely different gene expression pattern. There was no significant difference in phototropin between one side of the stem and the other.
Researchers The genes involved in heliotropism have not yet been identified.that is, the tendency to follow the sun. “We seem to have ruled out the phototropin pathway, but we found no clear evidence,” Harmer said.
Scientists tested possible responses by blocking blue, ultraviolet, red or far-red light with shadow boxes, but found no effect on the heliotropism response.
This shows that There’s probably more than one wayResponding to different wavelengths of light to achieve the same target. In future studies, the regulation of proteins in plants will be examined.
Sunflowers learn quickly. When the plants grown in the laboratory were taken outside, they began to follow the sun on the first day.Harmer said. This behavior was accompanied by a burst of gene expression on the shaded side of the plant that did not repeat in subsequent days. This suggests some sort of “rewiring” is occurring, he said.
In addition to revealing previously unknown pathways for light sensing and plant growth, Harmer said this discovery is of great importance. “Things described in a controlled environment like a growth chamber may not work in the real world,” he said.
Study reference: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002344
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Source: Informacion
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