The Venus Trap (Dionaea muscipula) is already a fascinating enough plant, but scientists have discovered something else surprising: it generates measurable magnetic fields when the leaves close.
And going much further D. muscipula, the latest research could teach us a lot about how plant life uses magnetic field signaling to communicate and as an indicator of disease (something we also see in humans and other animals).
It is well known that plants use electrical signals as a kind of nervous system, but the capture of biomagnetism has been complicated.
A 2011 study attempted to detect a magnetic field around a Titan arum (Amorphophallus titani) – this large and very smelly plant – which uses atomic magnetometers that are able to detect the smallest fluctuations.
This study revealed that the plant did not generate any magnetic field greater than one millionth of the strength of the magnetic field around us on Earth, which caused the experiment to be considered a failure.
The researchers involved in the 2011 study said their next steps, if they took any, would be to focus on a smaller plant.
For the new study, a different group of researchers was reduced.
“We have been able to show that the action potentials in a multicellular plant system produce measurable magnetic fields, something that has never been confirmed until now,” says physicist Anne Fabricant of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (JGU). ), in Germany.
Put the traps of Venus under observation. (Anne Manufacturer)
These “action potentials” are bursts of electrical activity, and Venus’s anti-theft trap can have several triggers: if the plant is touched, injured, affected by heat or cold, or loaded with liquid, potentials can be triggered. of action.
Here the researchers used heat stimulation to activate electrical activity and a glass cell magnetometer to measure magnetic perturbations. This approach not only minimized background noise, but had advantages over other techniques, as it could be miniaturized and did not require cryogenic cooling.
The measured magnetic signals increased to an amplitude of 0.5 picotesla, comparable to nerve impulses fired in humans and millions of times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field: a small, but detectable ripple.
“You could say the research looks a bit like performing an MRI on humans,” says Manufacturer. “The problem is that the magnetic signals from the plants are very weak, which explains why it was extremely difficult to measure them with the help of older technologies.”
In addition to MRI scans, other techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) are used to measure magnetic fields in humans, potentially identifying problems without any invasive procedure.
With the help of this current research, the same type of exploration could now also be done with plants: crops could be scanned for temperature changes, chemical changes or pests without having to damage plants, for example.
And we can add the findings to our growing knowledge about how plants send both internal and external signals, communicating through a hidden network that scientists are just beginning to explore properly.
“Beyond the principle test, our findings pave the way for understanding the molecular basis of biomagnetism in living plants,” the researchers write in their published paper.
“In the future, magnetometry may be used to study long-distance electrical signaling in various plant species and to develop non-invasive diagnoses of plant stress and disease.”
The research has been published in Scientific reports.