How do plants talk to each other and share information?

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A long time ago, there was a theory that talking to plants could help them grow better, and that might seem ridiculous, but the idea that plants respond to gender warnings can never be ridiculous. What if the plants themselves could "talk"? With each other?

Andrei Kessler, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University's School of Science and Arts, and his research team addressed a 12-year study of plant connections.

According to their research, published September 23 in the journal Biological Current, plants actually have a chemical means of talking to each other.

The Golden Oud
The project started on the golden oud plant "Goldenrod" (Soliago Tissima), a member of the star family contains 100 species of flowering plants, mostly herbaceous found in meadows and pastures, and monitor the impact of insects of grass-eaters, especially beetle leaf golden bars on the plant.

Plant messages are embedded in airborne chemicals known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that transmit information between plants.

The big discovery in this study is called "open channel connections" based on genotypes. Different plants have different scents. But when they are attacked by pests such as the gold leaf bar beetle, the special odors carried by VOCs become more uniform.

The results showed that neighboring plants pick up warning messages for VOCs and prepare for a potential threat, such as an insect pest attack.

"There is a kind of convergence of the same language, or the same warning signs, to exchange information freely," Kessler said in a university press release. "The exchange of information becomes independent of how the plant is closely related to its neighbor."

He explained how plants talk to each other by saying, "A volatile organic compound emitted by one plant can be picked up by another plant, and these plants can either prepare their defenses or directly stimulate those defenses."

However, the good intentions of plants towards their plant neighbors work only on the basis of "if you see something say something" and tasks are distributed to attack and strain pests evenly across plant populations as a result of communication between them.

Special language
Researchers have found that plants that live in clusters with no herbivores do not exchange information freely with their neighbors. Instead, they maintain a special channel with their closest relatives through VOC emissions that stimulate resistance, but only with their plant relatives or with parts of the plant far from the site of damage on the same plant.

"We're coding our language if we want to keep it as a special language, and that's exactly what happens there, but at the chemical level," he says. "This analogy is remarkable, not what we expected."

"What we often see is that when plants are attacked by pathogens or herbivores, they change the metabolism."

But this is not a random change in reality. These chemical and metabolic changes also help to deal with these attackers. They are very similar to our immune system, although plants do not have antibodies like what we have, they can resist using very poor chemistry, including defensive compounds.

"Push-Pull"
"Some VOCs can be attractive to predatory insects, or parasites that then come and kill the herbivores, save the plant, and call this indirect defense," says Kessler.

Another defense mechanism is the VOC itself. Previous research by the Kessler team has found that insect larvae avoid plants that emit these warning volatile organic compounds, regardless of whether the plants have been damaged or not.

These results can have practical applications worldwide. "For a long time, people have thought about using plant-organic interactions to protect crop plants, especially when they have inter-plant systems," the researcher explains.

"We are engaged in a push-pull system in Kenya, developed by the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology, which manipulates the flow of information to control pests in maize fields," he concluded.