Plant behaviour in response to the environment: information processing in the solid state
Salva Duran-Nebreda and George W. Bassel. 2019.
Salva Duran-Nebreda and George W. Bassel. 2019.
Information processing and storage underpins many biological processes
of vital importance to organism survival. Like animals, plants also
acquire, store and process environmental information relevant to their
fitness, and this is particularly evident in their decision-making. The
control of plant organ growth and timing of their developmental
transitions are carefully orchestrated by the collective action of many
connected computing agents, the cells, in what could be addressed as
distributed computation. Here, we discuss some examples of biological
information processing in plants, with special interest in the
connection to formal computational models drawn from theoretical
frameworks. Research into biological processes with a computational
perspective may yield new insights and provide a general framework for
information processing across different substrates.
Multicellular information processing in plants. (a) Stomata (dark cells) are dynamically open and closed in order to capture CO2 and avoid excessive loss of water. (b)
Thermal images of leaf surfaces showing the current state of stomata
aperture within sectors. Patches of coordinated stomata activity are
seen, indicating that collective dynamics of stomata are present in the
form of excitable media-like waves that propagate through the leaf
surface. (c) The hormone metabolic network underpinning the regulation of abscisic acid (ABA) and gibberellic acid (GA) levels in dormant Arabidopsis seeds. (d) Distribution of ABA and GA synthesis and response within distinct cell types of the dormant embryo radicle. (e) Spatial sites of ABA and GA responses within the dormant Arabidopsis embryo. (f) Attractor dynamics of the hormone metabolic interaction network in dormant Arabidopsis seeds when the distinct spatial embedding of hormone responses is taken into account.
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