Skip to footer

Why plants are smarter than us

Scientists have found that plants must do complex arithmetic to avoid starvation. 

|
John Nordell / The Christian Science Monitor
Droplets of rain water hang on the leaves of a spiderwort plant in the morning sun.

Comparing someone’s intellect to that of a potted plant is no longer such an insult.

Scientists at the John Innes Centre, a British research institute that focuses on plants and microbiology, found that plants must do complex arithmetic to calculate the amount of food needed to get them through the long, dark night.

"This is the first concrete example in a fundamental biological process of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation," said a JIC mathematical modeler, Martin Howard.

The new research, published in eLife, reports that mechanisms in plants’ leaves estimate the size of the plant’s starch store and the length of time before the sun rises and energy again becomes available. In daylight, plants use the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars and starches. Based on that information, the plant’s leaves appropriately adjust their rate of starch consumption to avoid starving before the sun comes up, but without being wasteful and harboring too much starch. At the end of the night, the plants project to have used 95 percent of their starch.

The precise calculations account for variations in daylight and accumulated starch stores.

“The calculations are precise so that plants prevent starvation but also make the most efficient use of their food,” said JIC metabolic biologist Alison Smith. “If the starch store is used too fast, plants will starve and stop growing during the night. If the store is used too slowly, some of it will be wasted.”

Scientists proposed that information about the size of the starch store and nighttime-length is encoded in the concentrations of two kinds of molecules in the plant. The scientists have called those molecules S for starch and T for time. The S molecules stimulate starch consumption, and the T molecules inhibit that consumption, so the rate of starch consumption comes out to the ratio of S molecules to T molecules – or S/T.

Scientists believe that further study of how plants regulate their starch consumption could give insights into more productive farming techniques.

"The capacity to perform arithmetic calculation is vital for plant growth and productivity," said Smith. "Understanding how plants continue to grow in the dark could help unlock new ways to boost crop yield."

So when faced with a tricky math problem, go ahead: vegetate. 

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Why plants are smarter than us
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0624/Why-plants-are-smarter-than-us
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe