Finding a Venus flytrap carries a certain amount of fines. If you brush only one trigger hair inside its leaves, the plant will likely not react. But if you trigger it fast enough, it will come into action, swinging its famous mouth.
Waiting for a double trip may prevent the plant from wasting rain on rain or other things that are not nutritious flies. But despite centuries of interest in the species, no one was quite sure how the plants remembered the first trigger to work on the second.
In a paper published last week in Nature Plants, researchers say they have found the cause: calcium ions. By inducing the flytraps to glow when calcium enters their cells, a team of scientists was able to show how hair is stimulated, how ions are formed, ultimately accelerated.
Mitsuasu Hasibe, head of the lab at the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, Japan, said research has shown that calcium is used to transmit information between cells of many different life forms. Molecules are usually “rare in a cell, but abundant in them,” he said, making it easier for cells to change concentrations and react.
In 1988, a pair of botanists speculated that two overlapping currents of calcium ions could stimulate the Venus flytrap to close, but there is no way to test their idea. More recently, another group of researchers, including Rainer Heidrich, who participated in a new paper, have shown that the solved part of the puzzle is that electrical signals tell the flighttrap when its trigger hair is pressed. They also speculated that calcium helps keep plants on track.
To visualize the flighttrap’s memory mechanism, Dr. Hsaby and his colleagues created a special type of gene in the plant. This gene, widely used in biology, makes a protein that turns fluorescent green when it binds to a target – in this case, a calcium ion.
At the time of the research, Hiraku Suda, the lead author of the paper and a doctoral student in Dr. Hasebi’s lab, was in charge of unifying the gene, which needed to infect the plant’s leaves with improved bacteria and then use the leaves to grow new shoots. .
It took him another year to get it out. The key, it turned out, was raising plants in the dark, making it easier for them to become infected with bacteria. When he finally got to work, he was so excited, “I didn’t sleep for a week,” he said.
Next, researchers began to plant plants. After a single tap of sensory hair, a greenish flush appeared at the base of the hair and quickly spread toward the leaves, indicating an increase in calcium ions.
Within about 30 seconds the second tap triggered an additional surge, pushing the total amount of calcium above the threshold, causing the trap to close. (In the experiment video, the glowing, chomping flytrap looks like a carnival fun house entry.) But if the researchers waited too long between taps, the concentration dropped again, and the trap didn’t turn.
“It’s really nice to see the calcium wave from the hair and the leaf travel,” said Uly Grosnicklaus, a botanist at the University of Zurich who was not involved in the research. Earlier this year, Dr. Grossnick us helped show that in some cases, a single, slow dissection of the trigger hair can also close the flytrap. He said more research on how calcium and electrical activity are related, and would further highlight plant works on the force and speed of the trigger tap.
Dr. Doctor Suda, a postdoctoral fellow at Saitama University in Japan, plans to use his new method to capture hunting, digestion and other activities of flytrap. “There are beautiful plants,” he said. “I can always create new questions by looking at them.”
