The Electric Plant Company Inc.
Abstract
This document summarizes plant’s abilities to sense their environment, and then process and transmit that information using electrical signals to different parts of their body and to other plants. We start with intriguing and little known similarities between plants and animals.
Plants and Animals Are Surprisingly Similar
Scientists believe that the common evolutionary ancestor of plants and animals could swim, and had “eyes” (eyespots) that let them stay away from shadows and paddle towards light 1–3. A relic of this proto-plant (and proto-animal), Mesostigma viride, can be found today swimming on microscope slides in biology classes, swinging its whip-like “arms” (flagella) to follow the flashlight beams of school children (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The common ancestor of animals and plants, Mesostigma viride.
Although modern plants have evolved to move in less obvious ways, they still use actin and myosin (what animal muscles are made of) to transport molecules within their cells 4, and they use these same “muscle proteins” to power the motors in their sperm cell tails, just like animal sperm 5. So, while modern plants don’t move externally as much as animals do, they have a lot of the same internal moving machinery 6.
Plant vs. Animal Nervous System
The evolutionary ancestors of plants and animals, mentioned above, were active swimmers that could follow light, but they did -not- have a nervous system to control their movement. This is because they were single celled organisms, with only a tiny distance (the ~10 micron diameter of a single cell) over which information needed to be conveyed. Over such small distances passive diffusion of chemical signals was sufficient to transfer information from one end of the cell to the other. Only after plant and animal evolution diverged, and each branch evolved into larger, multicellular organisms, did plants and animals each evolve their own long distance signal transmission systems, which ended up being surprisingly similar in many ways. Both plants and animals evolved to encode and transmit information through a cable of specialized cells which traverses the length of their body. In animals, this “cable” is called a nerve, which is made up of individual neuron cells (Figure 2, Left). In plants, the cable is called phloem, which is made up of individual sieve element cells (Figure 2, Right).
Animal
Plant
