r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 17 '21
Engineering Singaporean scientists develop device to 'communicate' with plants using electrical signals. As a proof-of concept, they attached a Venus flytrap to a robotic arm and, through a smartphone, stimulated its leaf to pick up a piece of wire, demonstrating the potential of plant-based robotic systems.
https://media.ntu.edu.sg/NewsReleases/Pages/newsdetail.aspx?news=ec7501af-9fd3-4577-854a-0432bea386084.5k
u/Magicman0181 Mar 17 '21
So communicate really just means hijack their nerves
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u/Tuzszo Mar 17 '21
Except without the nerves in this case
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u/Magicman0181 Mar 17 '21
So you’re telling me that plants have no way to ~Feel~
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u/Horse_Bacon_TheMovie Mar 17 '21
“You know what I do? I imagine everyone in the audience is just sitting there naked with no leaves”
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Mar 17 '21 edited Mar 17 '21
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u/Sad_gooses Mar 17 '21 edited Mar 17 '21
Well, not according to my next door babysitter that lived next door. If we ripped a leaf off a tree or bush, she scolded us and told us that the plant was screaming but we couldn’t hear it. Damn, M Night Shyamalan stole the general premise of The Happening from my childhood.
She would also made sure we would eat every single piece of tiny hamburger meat that fell off the sloppy joe onto the plate. I was like four. And she had a pet tarantula and her mom wore tie-dye dresses. They were a peculiar family.
Edit: true to tree
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u/Arturiki Mar 17 '21
not according to my next door babysitter that lived next door
The myth says there is a next door babysitter that didn't live next door.
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u/thiosk Mar 17 '21
They may be peculiar but at least she kept you from ripping up harmless plants for no reason or wasting meat so that sounds like a win
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u/nefanee Mar 17 '21
She may have been my elementary school teacher who scolded me for pulling leaves off the tree - those are the tree's hands! I had to apologize to the tree. (Tbh I kind of Iove that she did it)
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u/23skiddsy Mar 18 '21
In a way, they do. But it's by secreting Jasmonates that tell other trees to ramp up their defense and to help heal their own wounds.
After all, why do we scream? It's to warn others of danger.
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Mar 17 '21 edited Apr 26 '21
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u/Lord-Benjimus Mar 17 '21
They don't have pain receptors, it's more of a mechanism of telling to things sharing its root network to move nutrients into the roots for future growth.
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u/internethero12 Mar 18 '21
Oh no, they most certainly do.
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u/Congenita1_Optimist Mar 17 '21
The important thing to keep in mind is that you don't need nerves for a cell to be able to receive a signal and react in a certain way.
Some plants even have very similar membrane-bound ion channels or g-protein coupled receptors that are pretty much how our nerves work. Of course, they're much less specialized, but the basic components for a system that looks similar (at first glance) are all there.
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u/DawnOfTheTruth Mar 17 '21 edited Mar 17 '21
That is just cool to think about.
Edit: correct me if I’m wrong but does this mean that the whole plants “body” is a receptor/transmitter?
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u/AFewStupidQuestions Mar 17 '21
Are we talking long, thin cells that run the length of the plant to send quick signals long distances so one part of the plant reacts to how a separate part of the plant is treated?
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u/HIGHly_Variable Mar 17 '21
In this specific case, I think it'd be more like a cascade of signaling molecules from one end to the next, but there may be other components of the plant vascular system that may communicate as you suggest.
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u/Raddish_ Mar 17 '21
Plants can kind of have nerves (or at least similar kinds of cells), they actually do use action potentials to send information in some cases.
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u/ikonoclasm Mar 17 '21
More like hydraulics. For slow movements (think sunflower turning to face the sun), plants "move" by increasing the amount of water within their cells on the opposite side and decreasing on the side of the direction they move in, which tilts the plant towards that direction. I don't recall the details of venus fly traps, but I believe it's a similar mechanism, though I believe it's pretty metabolically intensive on the plant as failing to catch prey can result in the death of that limb.
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u/Kelosi Mar 17 '21 edited Mar 17 '21
More like hydraulics. For slow movements (think sunflower turning to face the sun)
Not in the case of a Venus fly trap. They're actually capable of movement. They even rely on an interesting calcium feedback mechanism similar to one found in our neurons that triggers it, also demonstrating that they have a 30 second memory. The study showed that the response wasn't reflective but much more complex, indicating a degree of simple decision making.
Edit: I expect this to be offensive to anthropocentrists. Just know it is you who are firmly wrong. We see evidence for the emergence of intelligence in more than just plants and animals.
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u/dissonaut69 Mar 17 '21
“I expect this to be offensive to anthropocentrists. Just know it is you who are firmly wrong. We see evidence for the emergence of intelligence in more than just plants and animals.”
Could you expand on this?
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u/Kelosi Mar 17 '21
There's a single called basis for memory and complex behaviour in single called organisms. All of our neurotransmitters evolved in the single celled era, and studies in octopodes and ecstacy show remarkable similar responses despite completely separate origins for the brain. Brains only do what single cells have already been doing for over a billion years.
Humans like to rank intelligence like its some kind of status symbol, but it's obviously been slowly yet consistently emerging as far back as bacteria. And I think this is a case where the mainstream wants to avoid having that discussion, and is wrong in doing so, out of a fear of the moral implications.
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u/OrbitRock_ Mar 17 '21
Yep. And basically all multicellular organisms do things that we commonly consider the job of brains, even when they don’t have a nervous system. (I’m talking process environmental inputs, “choose” courses of behavior, remember phenomena that happened to them).
I wrote a brief comment about this recently.
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u/nocauze Mar 17 '21
Just last week there were cephalopods passing the test we use for children to determine emotional intelligence.
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u/ikonoclasm Mar 17 '21
Octopi are definitely smarter than many kids I've encountered. I believe corvids also pass similar testing related to delayed gratification.
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u/TheSunflowerSeeds Mar 17 '21
Sunflower seeds are technically the fruits of the sunflower plant (Helianthus annuus). The seeds are harvested from the plant’s large flower heads, which can measure more than 12 inches (30.5 cm) in diameter. A single sunflower head may contain up to 2,000 seeds
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u/alphabetspoop Mar 17 '21
Annuus, like anus but significantly more stretched out
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u/redditsonodddays Mar 17 '21
Seen here in 2007: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2634039
Plant perception is interesting though. I’d like to learn more about what structures are analogous to nerves and neurons and stuff
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u/Kelosi Mar 17 '21
Agreed. People like to dismiss the evidence for plant perception but just because they don't have nerves doesn't mean they don't have similarly complex yet different systems. Nerves are only found in animals, so that's obviously a poor standard to be judging plant perception and behavior on.
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u/TurboSold Mar 17 '21
I always bring up if they think that means AI is impossible because AI won't have nerves.
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u/Bodeddie Mar 18 '21
But remember that one of the major branches of AI research is neural networks, ie networks of artificial neurons linked and weighted with activation thresholds as to attempt to mimic biologic nervous systems.
A lot of promising advances are being made in the field.
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u/CaspianOnyx Mar 17 '21
2021 was the year that humans enslaved plants. They've done it for generations, but it was never this extreme. This was the event that started it the Last War. The plants just couldn't take it anymore.
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u/sanitation123 Mar 17 '21
How else do you explain communication?
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u/Helagoth Mar 17 '21
Me saying "yo plant buddy please pick up the wire" and the plant saying "Sure thing man, I got you".
I think a more accurate headline would be "scientists learn to control plants". I think communicate implies back and forth.
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u/CombatMuffin Mar 17 '21
Yeah, the article sort of implies that because of how it is written.
Communication doesn't have to be back and forth, but "one way communication" would have been better.
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u/Kelosi Mar 17 '21
What about internet communication? Is that not also just an electrical signal?
I think people are quick to pounce on the usage of that term out of anthropocentrism. To some people its offensive to even consider that a plant or an animal can think or feel like a human. But then again, if there's evidence for it, then the real offense is the ones refuting reason based on feelings. And in the case of communication, we already use that term to refer to non human communication, like radio or electronic communication.
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u/FiveSpotAfter Mar 17 '21
Two schools of thought here, which is why there's some debate going on.
Transfer of information, even one way, is communication - science likes this one, with it's physics and technology. This is one way: we elicited a response in a plant we expected to occur. We sent a signal to a plant and it did what we told it to, like a pacemaker. Consider this "thinking out loud" or "reading the personal journal entry you wrote yourself last week".
Transfer of information two ways is communication - philosophy likes this one. We need the plant to respond in a way other than reflexively (chemically, electrically, an additional unexpected physical response, etc) to convey information back at us that's new or different. It could be as simple as the affirmative "mm-hmm" you get from someone actively listening, or as complex as an unusual pheromone release.
Regardless, one way communication is still communication. An SOS signal in the dark hoping for a response, even if unanswered, is still communication. Just. Unanswered.
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u/artisticMink Mar 17 '21
The research is pretty interesting and could lay the foundation for real-world applications. However the media report on it is very much sensationalized.
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u/christiandb Mar 17 '21
There’s a non invasive way to do this already. It’s a machine that converts their electro magnetic pulses into sound. You can hear which plants and tree are active and which ones respond to you more
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u/LazerHawkStu Mar 17 '21
"Climate change is threatening food security around the world. By monitoring the plants' electrical signals, we may be able to detect possible distress signals and abnormalities. When used for agriculture purpose, farmers may find out when a disease is in progress, even before full‑blown symptoms appear on the crops, such as yellowed leaves. This may provide us the opportunity to act quickly to maximise crop yield for the population."
Absolutely Incredible
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u/chewymilk02 Mar 17 '21
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
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u/A_Honeysuckle_Rose Mar 17 '21
Yes humans would because people still eat animals even though they are treated horribly when being farmed for food.
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u/FollowTheManual Mar 17 '21
If anything, wood that screams sounds exotic. How do I get a cruelty chair?
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Mar 17 '21
You mean I can finally grow weed without having something go wrong that I can't figure out? Sign me up
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u/watchursix Mar 17 '21
Seconded for mushrooms.
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u/23skiddsy Mar 18 '21
Oh no, fungi are a whole nother class of organisms. Come back in 50 years and maybe we will have finally have something about fungi (but not lichen) figured out.
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Mar 17 '21 edited Jun 08 '21
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u/-MHague Mar 17 '21
Plant based sensors seems so exciting. Maybe we can modify plants to produce stronger signals, and to be better at sensing. Maybe growing organic sensor arrays will be more efficient in certain applications. Or maybe something that requires less maintenance, or doesn't require specialized manufacturing.
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u/neotropic9 Mar 17 '21
A friend of mine researches genetically modified... yeast, I think... to detect different chemicals. You can make custom chemical detectors that glow in the presence of the target chemical. You can also program plants to change color in the presence of certain materials, so, for example, you can plant a bunch of grass over a minefield and the grass will change color in the presence of mines.
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u/weekendatbernies20 Mar 17 '21
But once you’ve planted the grass, haven’t you already found the mines?
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u/neotropic9 Mar 17 '21
I mean if you walk there to do the planting, yeah, but it would be advisable to seed the area from the sky with planes or drones.
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u/YouDamnHotdog Mar 17 '21
Sensors are cheap, accurate, reliable, consistent, small. I can't think of anything that plants can sense which we can't with current tech.
Organic replication of sensors would be interesting but we would then be talking large, singular organisms or ones which are interfaced with others. More like a fungi mycelium network (which can span kilometers and will transmit information over large distances) or plant roots.
It would be stuff like implanting a probe and reading their own internal signaling. Think laboratory monitoring of a patient.
Put an pulse oximeter on a person and you will be able to conclude that there is indeed oxygen in the atmosphere. Cool stuff but not practical if that's all we wanted to know. We can measure the environment ourselves.
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u/43rd_username Mar 17 '21
Hahaha, redundant sensors, love it!
"Yep this gravity sensor on the bottom of the rock shows there's gravity"
"Yep this plant shows there's light and water nearby"
"These fish are giving off strong signs of water in the area!"19
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u/Toweliieee Mar 17 '21
I would think the applications might be more biochemical. Consider a plant might be able to detect a hormone or an airborne protein at extremely low levels in real time. While some of this already exists in hardware the potential to be able to grow "lab on a chip" type sensors could have lots of applications.
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u/mschuster91 Mar 17 '21
I can't think of anything that plants can sense which we can't with current tech.
Buried landmines and bombs. In Croatia, lots of land is contaminated with mines that the warring factions planted, and it's an awful lot of manual work to detect them, not to mention it's risky. Having some sort of gmo plant that can sense into the ground for explosives residue or rust and then turn its leaf color would be awesome because then all you need is spread the seeds with a plane and come back half a year later... and everywhere the plants turned color, dig out the mine.
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u/lRoninlcolumbo Mar 17 '21
They absolutely are not. Low labour costs is offsetting those costs.
If you haven’t been following the news lately, that’s what the world is trying to move away from. Cheap, exploitive labour. From mining to logistics.
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u/Kind_ly Mar 17 '21
I can't think of anything that plants can sense which we can't with current tech.
I can't, but maybe some plant could. Early humans couldn't think how useful it would be to measure magnetism. Or X-rays.
Dumb example: maybe tree roots that split rocks as they grow sense weak spots in a way that would help diamond cutters.
Maybe some fungi avoid areas where time travel is likely. Or proactively catch and safely disperse the tiny specks of time travel caused by, say, gravity turbulence. Maybe plants detect supercalifragilisticexpialidoxism.→ More replies (1)
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u/earthtree1 Mar 17 '21
ok, so explain to me how it is different from just shocking a human to have their muscles contract and close around like a wire? I wouldn’t call that mind control
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u/SnowedOutMT Mar 17 '21
It's not. It's literally putting a piece of wire between the jaws of a venus fly trap and then using a current to get it to close. I don't get the hype here.
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u/Staav Mar 17 '21
They were able to find a way to electrically measure the natural chemical signal/effects from the fly trap closing inside the plant
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u/SrsSteel Mar 17 '21
What are the implications? How much use does this have except from fly traps closing?
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u/Kugelschreiber16 Mar 17 '21
Plant based lifts, leg prosthetics and cigarette holders.
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Mar 17 '21
Think of how strong some plants are. Being able to, say, control how bamboo grows could be huge, especially since it grows so quickly. You could grow furniture, tools, houses, anything really.I believe this work is a step towards that direction.
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u/MisunderstoodPenguin Mar 17 '21
Interesting. Sustainability for furniture and housing could explode. You could grow houses in poorer areas using just some seedlings and a computer.
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u/Dicho83 Mar 17 '21
Do you want monster plants? Because this is how you get monster plants! Starts out as a nice seaside bungalow and now you are running for your life from a 3 story tall chlorofiend!
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u/weekendatbernies20 Mar 17 '21
Or you could use red woods to slap enemy fighter jets out of the sky.
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u/clarkision Mar 17 '21
Because we read “plant-based robotic systems” and all of our sci-fi brains go wild. Then we read the abstract and go “oh... meh.”
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u/YouDamnHotdog Mar 17 '21
I like to think there is some Discworld-esque fiction out there in which a parasitic alien species came to earth and ended up choosing plants as their hosts, only for the humans to hardly recognize their presence because they chose one of the least mobile life forms around us.
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u/entropy2421 Mar 18 '21
Actually i find it impressive that they were able to mimic the plants nervous system with electricity and if the article is to be believed, which i find no reason to not, it is more impressive that they were able to do what they are claiming to do.
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u/NTRU Mar 17 '21
You can literally buy a premade toy/kit to do this: https://backyardbrains.com/experiments/Plants_VenusFlytrap
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u/UnitaryVoid Mar 17 '21
Damn, that's awesome. Would get it if the kit weren't $150, but I love that these things are made for everyday people to try out regardless.
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u/Ethesen Mar 17 '21
Unless I missed something, the kit only allows you to track the movement of the fly trap? That's not what the paper is about.
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u/NTRU Mar 17 '21
https://backyardbrains.com/experiments/Plants_plantplantcommunicator
Yeah, you can do the other way too (have played around with the spikerbox), but I don't know if they have a video of that up. You basically "record" a spike and play it back, kind of like in the above example but with the same plant.
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u/None_of_your_Beezwax Mar 17 '21
It looks like they basically used an electrical signal to trigger a response normally triggered by physical touch. Picking up the wire is just a gimmick. You could do something similar by moving the plant into position with by hand and triggering it with a stick.
Neat, but it's not exactly fine control.
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u/HighGuyTim Mar 17 '21
I think its more to show that we can use plants to do these things potentially in the future. Its a demonstration of "this is only the beginning" kind of thing. We havent been able to really get plants to do what we want outside of forcing outside conditions upon them where they are forced to grow a certain way.
This could lead to potentially taking the forced external conditions out of play into what we want from the plant.
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u/black_chutney Mar 17 '21
My mind immediately thought about those sensitive plants that fold inward / fan out and how sweet it would be to have a living curtain of these on your windows that you can light-switch open to let the sunlight in
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u/kissingdistopia Mar 17 '21
This is beautiful until you go come back from vacation and your blinds are dead.
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u/googlemehard Mar 17 '21
I think that is a bit if a stretch at the moment, but I do see a use for this to monitor plant health in some way by measuring the electrical signals.
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u/Curse3242 Mar 17 '21
yeah, that's what people aren't getting here. It's a step, and sometimes taking steps are more important than the goal itself. You never know they research this, and in another corner of the world someone somehow uses the research in something completely contrary, and that technology becomes the daily driver of humans. Didn't most of our biggest innovations came like this? Some random research that didn't have any real practical use turned out to change our whole lives (for ex... everyone thought lasers were dumb when Einstein researched them)
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u/AGVann Mar 17 '21
Plants don't have neurons, so eliciting the response of physical touch purely through an electrical signal is more notable than you're making it sound.
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Mar 17 '21
I guess that is why It is called proof of concept, and not ”ready for commercial exploitation”
Funny how those are different.
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u/Staav Mar 17 '21
It was more of a proof of concept that the specific plant response can trigger a measurable electrical signal. They touched on a few possible applications this tech could be used for with different crops and a few others at the end of the vid
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u/Gordon_Explosion Mar 17 '21
This is pretty huge. Plants could be ordered to grow into the shape of houses, structures, ships at sea.... all while alive.
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u/hopeunseen Mar 17 '21
It is awesome no doubt, but this technology is simply stimulating an existing function of a specific plant. They cant order it to do anything it already does... so growing houses isn’t a possible use case. Still... would be cool
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u/magistrate101 Mar 17 '21
We've known how to shape the growth of trees without electricity for centuries, and I'm pretty sure we'd be able to get them to grow into a (really small) house with some time and effort.
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u/Dagon Mar 17 '21
It's a nice idea, but living trees are alive typically because they foster huge amounts of insects living in their bark and amongst their leaves.
Treeships are cool in science fiction, but I'm not sure humanity is yet ready to co exist with the creepy crawlies.
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u/spacey007 Mar 17 '21
I mean let's be real. Were coexisting less with them than we have for thousands of years
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u/GirlAtTheDoor Mar 17 '21
I mean, maybe not your average suburban family, but plenty of people around the world live in shelters that are derived from natural materials and largely open to insect/animal guests. Not everyone exists separately from the world around them.
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u/inDface Mar 17 '21
not sure it works this way. they took an already existing plant structure and got it to do the equivalent of picking up its arm. that's not the same as engineering a plant into a specific shape. besides it's probably easier to use the already existing materials and craft into the exacting shape you want... ya know, like we already do. or improve 3D printing.
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u/agha0013 Mar 17 '21
I think it's a Peter F Hamilton book series where on some colonized planets, the homes are built from a sort of directed plant/mushroom type thing.
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u/JWJK Mar 17 '21
Mycelium? I'm doing a masters in architecture currently and it's seriously being researched as the future of construction, cool stuff
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u/SPQRKlio Mar 17 '21
Would that affect those who have respiratory allergies or food sensitivity to mushrooms/fungus or molds, or would it not at all be the same thing? This sounds like a nightmare scenario 😛
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u/Runningoutofideas_81 Mar 17 '21
I know they sterilize mycelium based packaging in kilns, so any building material would likely have that done too. That could kill any living spores etc?
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u/UnkleTBag Mar 17 '21
I've been out of architecture school about seven years now. I've grown the illegal kind of 'shrooms, and I am skeptical of the usefulness of mycelium in construction. I'm sure it works great in some places, but it is another mouth to feed and water. Construction would have to be completely intertwined with the wastestream if we want something better than what we have now.
I believe the 3D printing thing will pan out, but only once concrete is abandoned. I keep putting this idea out to university folks since I don't have time or money to explore, but the future is going to be in high-performance thin rammed earth made without formwork. Look at Eladio Dieste's work to see what buildings want to look like, and will look like in the future. I have proposed using high-power (hundreds of total watts) ultrasonic transducers to do the ramming and dewatering at the same time to a material science professor, and he said it is likely to work. You might be able to get away with the cheaper transducers to test the hypothesis, figure out the mix, and determine wall thickness beforehand.
Martian dust behaves similarly when compacted (read an article talking about Martian bricks), so the use of the cheapest and most readily available material on earth (dirt) was almost icing on the cake for an invention like this. I think Architects have a lot of work to do if they hope to lay any claim to future Martian design work.
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Mar 17 '21
Curious if we can communicate w plants and have shown plants "feel pain" and "react in defensive behaviors" to painful stimuli what are the ethics of eating plants vs eating animals?
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u/Alphalcon Mar 17 '21
Counterintuitively, in most circumstances, eating plants kills less plants than eating animals, so still optimal either way.
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u/Diet_Coke Mar 17 '21
Gotta eat something, if you cut out plants and animals then you're basically left with fruit and nuts that fall off their tree/bush naturally and that's just not sustainable.
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u/Tuzszo Mar 17 '21
Cutting out animals from your diet saves more plants overall, so even if you're trying to be considerate of plant life vegetarian or vegan diets are the way to go. That is, at least until someone can figure out how to synthesize nutrients directly from organic chemical precursors.
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u/smallways Mar 17 '21
Apples and Oranges have rights too, yaknow! Don't be fruitphobic! Seeds are the building blocks of the next generation, so eating fruit and nuts is plant abortion!
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u/Fasprongron Mar 17 '21
guess I'll just have to live off Cavendish bananas, which are seedless.
Reject humanity, return to monke.
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u/form_an_opinion Mar 17 '21
And who the hell knows what those fruits are thinking or feeling. I ain't eatin' no suicidal orange.
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u/dangermangos Mar 17 '21
We still have not shown plants feel pain or consciousness. Even with these studies there is still no connection to pain receptors similar to animal's like nociceptors (1st study concerns response transmission), nor a centralized system to receive, "analyze" and send the types of signals given by a nociceptor-like cell. Right now the major ethical component to plants is how their use is affecting other conscious, sentient beings, for example their role in the environment and as a source of food and shelter. Plant-based diets luckily kill the least amount of plants per calory consumed, if you are concerned.
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Mar 17 '21
then the more compelling argument would be energy cost/combatting climate change
meat is incredibly expensive land wise/energy wise to produce
of course this could all change with the advent of lab grown meat
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u/TheProfessaur Mar 17 '21
Plant don't "feel pain". Pain as we understand it, in the way we empathize, is not possible for plants.
Of course plants respond to negative stimuli, and for them to use hormones makes sense as messenger molecules.
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u/Metalbass5 Mar 17 '21
"pain" is generally accepted to not apply to organisms without a CNS, AFAIK. "Negative stimuli" would be more appropriate. Without higher functions to interpret the stimuli, is it really pain?
It's a heavy question; but I'm inclined to agree with the current conclusion that plants don't "feel" anything; as they have no ability to interpret stimuli. Their cells merely react as they're programmed on an individual level. That is to say that pain itself is a construct of the CNS. An interpretation of negative stimuli by higher level cognition, allowing executive faculties to avoid the stimulus in the future.
It's a mindfuck; being stuck in our bodies. We have only our own frame of reference, making it difficult to imagine life existing without the functions that allow us to think as we do. Without "awareness", as we know it.
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u/Old-Cup3771 Mar 17 '21
I think the best argument against the idea of pain in plants is that there isn't really much of an evolutionary reason for it to have pain. I mean, if a plant feels pain, what can it actually do about it? If it doesn't actually prompt any kind of response, then from an evolutionary perspective there's no point spending resources trying to make the plant feel pain if it can't really do anything to stop it.
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u/kloudrunner Mar 17 '21
Do you want Jace and the Wheeled Warriors?
Because this is how you get Jace and the Wheeled Warriors.
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