As you probably already know, climate change and environmental degradation in multiple areas of the globe is causing the sixth mass extinction in the geological history of the Earth. Some animals are already migrating to less warm places. It is a behavior that occurs in an attempt to adapt to the drastic changes that humans are causing. Habitat change is certainly not the only survival strategy that animal species are going to have to put into play, but it is one that animals can count on.
Plants, on the other hand, lack the ability to move and cannot leave the place where they live in search of other lands. To respond to climate change, and the changes associated with it, such as droughts, variations in soil salinity, attacks by insect pests or infections by microorganisms, etc., plants can only use the genetic and molecular mechanisms that for millions of of years of evolution they have been collecting and storing in their genome. I am not speaking here, therefore, of the slow adaptation to changes that occurs generation after generation over millions of years, but of the adaptation that as individuals, plants must achieve in order to remain alive in the face of adversity and to be able to pass on their genes to the next generations.
Just as animals use their greater or lesser intelligence, depending on the functioning of their nervous systems, to assess environmental conditions and respond to them, recently accumulated scientific evidence indicates that plants also have their own intelligence, an intelligence that It is not based on the functioning of the nervous system, but it works in another way. However, plants can learn, they can communicate with others, they can memorize, and they can make decisions in response to certain stimuli. This is not so surprising, at least to me, since the cells of our own immune system can do the same thing: assess the threats posed by microorganisms that try to infect us, respond to them expeditiously, communicate to other cells the nature and the extension of that threat so that they go to the place of infection to join the battle and remember the type of enemy with which they have fought, to defeat it again more quickly if there were a subsequent invasion attempt on their part.
So we see that, faced with the frequent adversities of life, organisms and the cells that form them have developed strategies that follow a similar logical pattern. Plants are no exception and throughout their evolution they have been accumulating genes and molecular mechanisms that they can turn on or off when necessary to adapt to the vicissitudes of the environment, even though they cannot run to save themselves, or the best, precisely for that reason.
However, despite the fact that the survival mechanisms that plants must activate can only depend on the genetic information they contain in their genome, they cannot depend on changes in that information. In other words, the genetic information that each individual plant of each species contains is the same and will not change throughout its life. There will be no mutations in it that allow them to adapt to changes. These mutations will occur as generations follow, and will allow adaptations to slower changes in the environment, but plants cannot count on them throughout their lives.
Thus, the adaptive response to the changes that occur in life necessarily depends on changes in the functioning of certain genes that plants have been acquiring and selecting throughout their evolution. How do these changes in gene function occur?
Research carried out with plants indicates that they bring into play epigenetic mechanisms to modify the activity of their genes in response to different types of stress. Let us remember that epigenetic mechanisms act, in general, by chemically modifying genes or the proteins that bind to them, but without thereby modifying the genetic information. For example, an epigenetic mechanism consists of the addition of atoms on the ADN that change the gene-adhering properties of transcription factors. If these factors cannot come together correctly or, on the contrary, come together more strongly, the generation of ARN messenger, the ARN that contains the copy of the gene information that is going to be translated into the proteins responsible for cellular mechanisms, is modified downwards or upwards, respectively.
These epigenetic mechanisms have several advantages over the genetic ones, regarding the changes in information that occur over the course of generations. The first is that they are reversible, that is, they can be activated or inhibited according to the needs of the plants, with what they detect and decide what they need to do to survive. Thus, genetic information is used flexibly. However, a second advantage is that, despite its reversibility, when necessary, when the original environmental conditions have not been recovered and there appears to be a more guiding trend towards some type of condition, for example higher temperature or higher humidity, the epigenetic changes carried out by a plant throughout its life, those changes of nature, let us remember, chemistry suffered by the ADNcan also be transmitted from generation to generation, just like genetic information.
The foregoing may again seem surprising, but it ceases to be when we realize that what is transmitted from generation to generation are the molecules of ADN. These are the ones that, when they contain some chemical modification, are also transmitted with it to the following generations. In the case of epigenetic modifications, these thus transmit to the descendants information about what level of functioning of certain genes is adequate to be able to better adapt to the conditions in which their parents or grandparents have survived.
Knowledge of the hundreds of genes involved in the epigenetic mechanisms of plants is still far from complete, and there is an intense debate about them in the scientific community. These genes seem to coordinate and thus generate a kind of plant intelligence without which they could not survive. The understanding of this intelligence and the development of molecular methods to be able to communicate with it, could help in the future to improve the cultivation of some plants and their crops, which will be necessary in a world in which the human population does not let to grow.
Jorge Laborda (07/12/2022)
Works by Jorge Laborda.
WE ARE SURROUNDED!
WE ARE SURROUNDED!
Your defenses against coronavirus
Your defenses against coronavirus
Deflamed immunology: An introduction to the immune system and its pathologies
Deflamed immunology: An introduction to the immune system and its pathologies
Deflamed immunology: An introduction to the immune system and its pathologies
Kilo of Science Volume XII eBook
Kilo of Science Volume XII Paper
Kilo of Science Volume I. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume II. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume III. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume IV. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume V. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume VI. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume VII. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume VIII. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume IX. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume X. Jorge Laborda
Kilo of Science Volume XI. Jorge Laborda
Matrix of homeopathy
Chained circumstances. Ed.Lulu
Chained circumstances. Amazon
One moon, one civilization. Why the Moon tells us that we are alone in the Universe
One moon, one civilization. Why the Moon tells us that we are alone in the Universe
One Moon one civilization why the Moon tells us we are alone in the universe
The thousand and one bases of ADN and other science stories
Adenius Fidelius
The intelligence funnel and other essays
The gods have been cloned