The cells of plants, animals and humans all use electrical signals to communicate with each other. Nerve cells use them to activated¹ muscles. But leaves, too, send electrical signals to other parts of the plant, for example, when they were injured and are threatened by hungry insects. "We have been asking ourselves for many years what molecular² components³ plants use to exchange information among each other and how they sense the changes in electric voltage," says Professor Rainer Hedrich, Head of the Chair for Molecular Plant Physiology⁴ and Biophysics at the University of Würzburg. 

 

This question has been intriguing⁵ Hedrich since the mid⁶ 1980s when he was still a postdoc in the laboratory of Erwin Neher at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen. "Back then, we used the patch clamp technique to make the first-time discovery of an ion channel in plants which is activated by calcium⁷ ions and an electric field." In 2005, other scientists then found the gene⁸ underlying⁹ this ion channel (name: TCP1). And now it has been Hedrich's team again that has identified that part of the channel which functions as a sensor¹⁰ for electric voltage and activates¹¹ the channel.

 

Their detailed¹² findings are published in the journal Plant Biology. Having received attention from the scientific world, the article has been recommended by the "Opens external link in new windowFaculty of 1000" in the meantime. The renowned¹³ platform, which evaluates scientific publications, is operated by worldwide leaders in biology and medicine.

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