How plants communicate between their roots - Prof. Ariel Novoplansky at TEDxJaffa

Professor Ariel Novoplansky talks about the unique way in which plants communicate through their roots. Via a complex system of non-verbal communication, plants are able to warn each other of impending danger and experiences. With his team of research scientists, Prof. Novoplansky has mapped the ways in which plants communicate, an important factor in agricultural planning, and also proven that plants have memory.

There is a very profound question

that you see on the screen.

If a tree falls in a forest -- and no one is around to hear it,

does it make a sound?

You all know this question and this question is attracting

the attention of philosophers for over a 300 years.

But this question, very question, would seem

totally ridiculous to the plants neighboring this tree,

which for many decades listened to messages

and signals coming from this fallen tree.

So today I'm going to tell you something

about plant communication

and something about the ways

plants learn from each other about their environment.

We all know something about that communication.

Plants communicate with animals all the time.

Not necessarily with fancy mammals like us

but more with little creatures like the insects

and the birds you see on the screen.

They attract them by putting out very flashy flowers

to make sure that they are pollinated.

This is part of their sex life.

This is one way they communicate.

Another way is to --

They need some transition services for their seeds.

Therefore they make flashy fruits

and put some little sweet candies inside

so mammals and other creatures will carry them away

to new places, to new environments.

This is communication - look at the colors.

This is not only communicating with us.

This is communicating with very many other creatures.

But these are very simple ways

that the plants are taking

relying on the services made by animals.

This is all relying on the fact

that those animals have some brains.

They can decide whether to choose fruits,

whether to visit a flower.

This is using the brain of the animal.

There is some decision, motor, engine behind it.

Not of the plant - the animal.

But in our research, we are trying to do something else.

We try to find out whether plants can communicate

between themselves, with other plants.

And one nice example is by the phenomenon

we call talking trees.

This is not from our own studies but from other studies --

other studies from the other laboratories around the world.

Trees are stuck in the same place - most of them.

Once they're germinated they are bound to stay there

for the rest of their lives.

Sometimes for hundreds of years.

They cannot run away

and this is making their lives very difficult because

there are very many creatures [who] are out to get them.

Many insects, mammals and other creatures

can simply come and bite their head off.

If they won't do anything good about it.

And one way - there are many ways the plants

defend themselves against this munching -

but one way is to put out

or to accumulate all kinds of nasty chemicals.

Once they have the chemicals,

they deter some of those grazers, herbivores -

all kinds of animals that want to munch on them.

And, in fact, they do something else too.

Once there is some munching on the plant,

some plants are capable of putting out

all kinds of odors - volatile materials,

which become airborne and picked up by other parts

of the same plant and other nearby neighbors.

Which, only when they get this message,

this communication from another plant,

start to produce toxins,

which deter any attack - by insects in this case.

This is pretty sophisticated behavior

for brainless creatures, I would say.

What else can they chat about? (Laughter)

And this is something that we are dealing with in our group.

We are asking specifically in one of our projects:

Can plants eavesdrop - listen to the hardships,

the stresses their neighbors undergo.

And use this information

to resist and survive better in the future.

Imagine the following situation.

There is a plant. Something bad happens to it -

stress like drought or high levels of salt -

we all know very well from this country, and it is stressed.

It is doing miserably. But now I am asking

whether a neighbor plant, which is totally

or seemingly oblivious to the stress of the other plant,

would sense the information,

get the communication and do something about it.

I am asking about the red arrow here.

So how do we do this?

All you need is a bunch of seed[ling]s

and a knife or a pair of scissors.

You cut off the root of a plant -

it would regenerate immediately many other roots.

And you can choose, carefully choose, which is very easy

to do for a five-year old, plants with only two roots.

And if they put out six, you take away four,

you leave them with two - more or less identical -

and you put them together like this:

sharing one pot in the middle.

Sharing a pot in the middle allows them

to communicate if they choose to do so.

This is allowing a route of communication between the roots.

Obviously, there is another channel for communication.

Among the leaves using the same mechanism

we were discussing before,

through [volatile chemicals] in the air.

So what can we do?

We just stress one root of one of the plants

and we ask - obviously we know that this guy

is going to be miserable about it - and we ask

whether the other guy will do something about it too.

OK? What do we measure?

We want something, which is simple to study,

simple to measure, and we want a rapid response -

something physiological, which is easy to pick up.

And one of those things is the way

plants keep their leaves open or close

when they are facing a problem.

What you see here,

thousands of times enlarged on the screen,

is little pores every plant has in its leaves

through which it is exchanging gas

with its environment.

These pores are openable, they are very flexible.

It's like little shutters -

they can close and open very-very swiftly -

through which they absorb CO2 and emit O2, oxygen.

By the way, which allows us

to resist and survive and to live on this planet.

So when the plant is happy, it is opening the stomata,

there is no outlook for any stress,

and this is how they look - open stomata.

Stomata are the little wholes. And when the plant

is unhappy, or expecting some problem,

for instance drought, it is closing those little pores.

And this is measurable, we can take a photograph

and measure it very easily.

So happy plants. We take a set of plants like this:

the one we are going to induce a stress to and a neighbor

and when there is no stress they are happy.

Nice and happy - look at the stomata -

they are smiling at you.

They are so happy about it.

But what if I stress - by draught -

one root of one of the plants?

It is miserable, closing its stomata,

the little holes, the little pores,

but also the neighbor - which was never harmed,

never stressed before - feels something.

There is communication. Why to eavesdrop?

Why should an unstressed neighbor

use such an information? It was not stressed!

Well, in many cases, if my neighbor is stressed now,

there is a very high chance that I am going to be stressed

in a few minutes, a few hours or a few days.

So better prepare for this.

Preparation for future is something

extremely important in the evolution

and in the ecology of any creature.

The more interesting and more difficult question is

why the stressed neighbor would allow

or give such information to its neighbors.

After all they can be its enemies, its competitors.

Well, in many cases plants are tremendously large.

They can be as large as a few football fields.

They can weigh hundreds of tons in biomass.

They can be tremendously large.

When attack is happening in one corner or one bunch,

there is a very good rationale

to disperse the information to the rest of the plant.

Some of them can be large by cloning.

They have many twin parts which spread over

like in the lawn grasses in your back yard.

Or the strawberries you eat. Or the birch trees.

They are all clonal. They have very many members

which are connected together.

Some of which are severed from each other, disconnected.

So it's a good idea to disperse the news, the warning.

Stress is happening. So if this logic is correct,

I would expect something even more elaborate.

That a non-stressed plant would share the information with its neighbors.

Not only the stressed plant would share, but also

the unstressed neighbor would share the information

with further, with more neighbors. OK?

Testing it is simple. Now you know the method,

you can be a scientist as me.

You take this system, which we already know

what happens in - the first neighbor is responding,

there is communication,

and we simply add more neighbors.

And we ask the same question.

Would this information be relayed to them?

Would this unstressed neighbor share the information

with additional neighbors?

And this is after fifteen minutes. Fifteen short minutes!

Three plants were closing their stomata.

So there was relay,

there was sharing by unstressed plants.

And in on hour only, all five plants in a row,

and if I would work hard enough,

and my people would work hard enough,

I bet you it would reach the tenth plant too.

So there is both communication and sharing

of the information by unstressed individuals here.

This is all by plants having no brains - remember that!

So far so good, but we've been showing

the communication and the sharing of the information

but we haven't proven yet that this was happening

through the root communication.

This was all done by a system sharing roots, right?

In order to prove or to test whether it was through the root

or through the shoots, the leaves above ground,

through volatile chemicals, we have to add another set

of plants which were not sharing the roots.

And, indeed, when plants are not sharing the roots,

there is no communication in this case.

Which is a direct proof that communication

of such stress signals is going between the roots.

But there is a more profound question here. After all,

stomata, as I already declared, work extremely rapidly.

They can open and close in a few seconds,

in a few minutes, they can reopen

after a few seconds, a few moments.

And indeed this is what they are doing

after getting the "cry wolf" warning signals.

So this is a little fishy or might be fishy,

maybe it's not so essential,

maybe it's not significant for the real life.

And the profound question here is to ask

whether plants would learn from their past experiences

and counter with a stressed plant and get better

in facing and surviving hardships in the future -

in this case a drought.

And the way to test this is very simple.

You take the very same system you already know.

A row of plants sharing the root systems in the dirt pots:

in one case you don't stress them,

and in another case you do stress.

What do we stress and not stress?

One root of one plant in the row. That's it!

And then we expose the entire system to real drought.

And here is the real test!

In real life, not just blinking your pores, right?

In real life.

So this is the happy plant,

which never got any exposure to stressed neighbor,

and after one month it's bone dry!

As would be expected in Israeli green-house

40 °C degrees in summer.

OK, this is not surprising anyone here.

But this guy, this set, got one of the roots

of one of the plants exposed to drought

before the experiment started,

before the exposure to drought started.

And one month later, this is how it looks!

This is not by giving it more water!

This is by the plants getting an experience,

the communicative experience, of facing a neighbor

that once in the past was exposed to drought,

using the information, storing it somehow

and using it later in life

and better survive and resist drought in the future.

This is both learning and memory

of brainless creatures.

And this is a big lesson!

The lesson is from the humble creatures

which have no brain but can learn, memorize

and use the environmental information later on

for better survivorship.

I want to thank the members of my lab:

Dr. Omer Falik, who over-viewed the process

and most of the experiments, Ishay Hoffman,

Yonat Mordoch, Daniel Ben-Natan Sion,

Miri Vanunu and Oron Goldstein;

and the generous financial support

of the Israel Science Foundation.

Thank you very much!

(Applause)