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PIEZOACTIVITY, polarization and optical birefringence, such as in butterfly wings, are explored in chemicals for nanomotors and molecular machines. Biomimicry at its best. An inspiring review. https://lnkd.in/eBe5QYb View in LinkedIn

Guess. View in LinkedIn

NERVE AND MUSCLE ION CHANNELS are "excitable membranes and ion channels exhibit properties characteristic of ferroelectrics, including critical temperatures, hysteresis, pyroelectricity and surface charges...Leuchtag proposed a functional role for ferroelectric phase transitions in ion channels." https://lnkd.in/eBe5QYb View in LinkedIn

DEVELOPMENTAL CONSTRAINTS. "Perhaps more subtle are the various developmental constraints that influence the relationship between the body surface areas, volumes, and cytoplasmic machinery of cells. Nowhere are these more clearly expressed than among plant species sharing the unicellular plant body plan, which is typically determinate in growth in size, geometry and shape." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/85/4/411.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

BONE HEALING. "The piezoelectric effect plays an important role in bone growth, remodeling, and fracture healing." https://lnkd.in/eBe5QYb View in LinkedIn

"DEVELOPMENTAL CONSTRAINTS are important to body plan evolution. For plants, one of the most obvious of these is the phyletic legacy of a cell wall, which evolved independently many times among the various plant lineages and whose mode of deposition and material properties profoundly influence how cell size and shape are free to change." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/85/4/411.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

"BIOPIEZOELECTRICITY is exhibited in large-scale biological systems such as proteins, biopolymers, polysaccharides, organelles and glands." https://lnkd.in/eBe5QYb View in LinkedIn

BYPASSING ANIMAL CONSTRAINTS. "Arguably, this ontogeny permits morphological and anatomical convergence as well as divergence among phyletically otherwise divergent plant lineages because it holds the potential to bypass many of the developmental constraints imposed on metazoans that often have a `closed and determinate' ontogeny." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/85/4/411.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

PLANT OPEN PLAN. "Importantly, most of these body plans have an ‘open and indeterminate' ontogeny involving multiple growing points and persistent cellular divisions throughout the lifetime of the individual such that adult size, geometry and shape are not necessarily developmentally prefigured in the juvenile condition." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/85/4/411.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on plant body plans. Plants may as well have come from Mars biologically speaking, for they differ from animals so markedly. And although it is unfortunate that the animal maze term ‘plant intelligence’ has been used to describe their ability to predict, anticipate, and react to circumstances, which has caused an uproar in the Luddite community, these creatures without neurons clearly have the ability to cogitate in sophisticated ways. View in LinkedIn