NEW YORK: Plants can’t feel pain or hunger like animals, but their cells can communicate stress in a way that’s not so different from what animals do, scientists have found.
The finding, published this week in Nature Communication, shows that plants use a compound — the same compound used as an essential neurotransmitter in animal brains — to create electrical signals that regulate growth when facing drought, viruses or extreme temperatures.
In other words, this is how plants manage stress without having a central nervous system.
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As opposed to animals, which have long lines of nerve cells to shoot messages across an organism, this discovery suggests that there’s a cell-to-cell communication in plants that’s just intrinsically a part of all plant tissues.
“Plant cells are not very isolated,” said Jose Feijo, a contributor to the study’s research team out of Australia and a professor at the University of Maryland. “[The neurotransmitter] is able to shuttle from one cell to another pretty rapidly.”
