Month: September 2022

"THREE HALLMARKS of thigmomorphogenesis are: a dose responsiveness that prevents the plant from responding to isolated events, a systemic nature such that a stimulus applied to one organ leads to changes in overall plant morphology, and a characteristic delay between the initial stimulus and the developmental response." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

PLANT NUMERACY. "There is evidence that plants are able to record the number and frequency of mechanical stimuli. The Venus flytrap uses action potentials to measure the number of times an insect touches the trigger hairs of its trap over the course of an hour." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR SENSITIVITY. "Plants are also able to sense the number and frequency of stem bending events. When several bends are imposed on poplar stems, the impact on the transcriptome becomes less pronounced from the second bending event onwards. It also takes no less than a week without bending for a stem to recover full molecular sensitivity to such mechanical deformation." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

GENE UPREGULATION. "Plants also respond to touch in the short-term, though how these events are connected to long-term changes in body plan remains unclear. Following a single touch event, plants rapidly upregulate a large number of genes; in Arabidopsis as much as 2.5% of its genome." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

TOUCH MEDIATORS. "Various signalling molecules and phytohormones, including intracellular calcium, jasmonates, ethylene, abscisic acid, auxin, brassinosteroids, nitric oxide, and reactive oxygen species, have been implicated in touch responses. Many genes are induced following touch." https://lnkd.in/dbRzjKM View in LinkedIn

TOUCH-INDUCED GENES. "These genes encode proteins involved in various cellular processes including calcium sensing, cell wall modifications, and defence. Twenty-three per cent of these up-regulated genes contain a recently identified promoter element involved in the rapid induction in transcript levels following mechanical perturbations." https://lnkd.in/dbRzjKM View in LinkedIn

DEFENSE AND WOUND GENES. "The best characterized of these in Arabidopsis are the TOUCH (TCH) genes, which encode calmodulins and calmodulin-like proteins, cell wall-modifying enzymes, and wound- and defense-inducible genes." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

TOUCH GENES. "The timing of the induction of most TCH genes is between 5 and 30 minutes after the application of stimuli, suggesting a role in the early response to touch stimulation. The cml24 (tch2) mutation affects root morphology on hard agar and is implicated in microtubule structure and starvation-induced autophagy but a functional role for TCH genes in thigmomorphogenesis has yet to be established." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

GENE INDUCTION. "In trees, the transcription factor gene ZFP2 is rapidly induced in response to bending. Interestingly, this induction can be attenuated after multiple bending events, suggesting that plants are able to record the number of mechanical perturbations, albeit through an unknown mechanism." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn

JASMONIC ACID ACCUMULATION. "The growth response is likely to involve the phytohormone jasmonic acid (JA). JA accumulates in the stems of plants after touching of their rosette leaves, and JA biosynthesis and signaling are required for thigmomorphogenesis." https://lnkd.in/dv9swtZ View in LinkedIn