Plant Communication: How Leaf Calls Bud

Plants communicate with themselves in email (07/13/2001), and the messages are being hacked by scientists.  Miguel Blázquez, writing in Science,¹ discussed three recent studies that help solve the problem of how a plant, without a nervous system, buds into flowers all at once.  Two of the studies describe a couple of proteins that, working in concert, turn on the budding process.  “The third paper by Huang et al. in this week’s Science Express,” he writes climactically, “reports how the two factors meet—FT transcript travels from leaf to shoot via the plant vascular tissue” (emphasis added in all quotes).  This is just one example of a widespread phenomenon.  “Indeed, long-distance movement of RNAs through the phloem has been well documented in plants,” he writes.
    Robert Roy Britt has written a popular account of this research on LiveScience.com.  See also the Max Planck Society press release about a related study.

¹Miguel A. Blázquez, “The Right Time and Place for Making Flowers,” Science, Vol 309, Issue 5737, 1024-1025 , 12 August 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.1117203].

This is just too cool.  Imagine– plants communicating via microscopic packets of information through their vessels.  You thought those tubes just carried water and nutrients from the soil.  Had you any idea that, included in that oozing sap, was all kinds of coded information?  Think of it: plants invented TCP/IP before man did.  To Comprehend Plants / Information Processing.