Why do plant twists and turns happen?

With the rapid growth of the population, crop producers have to grow crops in more challenging terrain where plant roots would be faced with barriers. Under the circumstances, physicists at Cornell University and plant biologists from Boyce Thompson Institute have uncovered a valuable plant root action. When the roots' downward path is blocked, as often happens in rocky soil, it will display a "grow and switch" behavior. The finding is published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which also published some other studies on recombinant proteins.

The research group observed growth patterns arising from how plant roots cope with limitations of their gravity sensors. When there is no root barrier, its growth is straight down. On the contrary, when barriers are present, roots coil in some instances and wave in other situations.

"We found that the roots make planar coils when the barrier they encounter is flat, and transition to wavy geometry when the barrier is at an angle," said Tzer Han Tan '14, lead author on the new paper, "How Grow-and-Switch Gravitropism Generates Root Coiling and Root Waving Growth Response in Medicago truncatula."

Plant roots have gravity sensors in each cell at the root's tip, which are comprised of dense particles called "statoliths" that enable the roots to determine which way is down. When a root meets a barrier, the root conquers the barrier with a search strategy. Surprisingly, the strategy the plants adopt is basically the same search algorithm as the 'run-and-tumble' strategy found in many bacteria. Essentially, the roots grow in a particular direction, and from time to time curve to switch their growth directions. The researchers learned that these course corrections have a 90 percent accuracy.

There is no doubt that the detail knowledge of how roots grow is critical for more efficient food production in the future. Only knowing more can we deal with the problems brought by climate changes. Flarebio provides superior recombinant proteins like recombinant Insr at good prices.