plants

An interdisciplinary symposium in Berlin will examine whether intelligence across radically different biological and artificial systems shares common organisational principles.

Coastal dune systems develop large-scale spatial patterns through feedback between vegetation density and the movement of sand. Researchers studying marram grass and developing dunes on the Dutch island of Texel found that densely vegetated patches capture disproportionately more windblown sand, allowing larger dunes to grow while smaller neighbours shrink or disappear.

Engineered bacterial communities can use chemical communication to coordinate a metabolic division of labour that no single strain performs as effectively alone.

An injured plant root can transmit a mechanical warning through its vascular system far faster than the calcium signals normally associated with plant defence.

Dodder vines may function as biological communication bridges linking otherwise separate plants through direct vascular connections. Cuscuta forms haustoria that penetrate host tissues, but those connections carry considerably more than water and nutrients.

Plant roots can detect damage to a neighbouring plant almost immediately and redirect their own growth away from the disturbance.

Bees and flowering plants share one of nature’s most elegant and essential symbiotic relationships. This relationship goes beyond the visible interactions of bees landing on flowers and emerging covered in pollen.

Kagoshima University researchers identified methyl benzoate as an airborne plant-defence signal whose release rises around dusk. Plants receiving the compound activate defence-related genes through NPR1, a central regulator of plant immunity, using a response pattern distinct from the better-known signal methyl salicylate.

Researchers combined more than 16,000 soil samples with predictive models to map the global density of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks.

This is biomimicry by a plant, and it just shows that nothing humans create will come close to the rich and bizarre natural world.

A Springer Nature Research Communities article describes a plant-inspired adaptive façade using hygromorphic, biobased 4D-printed materials that change shape in response to weather.

Chinese Scientists Bioengineering Plants With Firefly Genes to Glow, in Effort to Light Cities at Night The bioluminescent flora were created by splicing genes from fireflies and glowing fungi into the plant cells, allowing them to emit a soft glow.