How Plants Communicate

A new way of communication between plants may have been unraveled by Jim Westwood, a professor who works in the fields of plant pathology, physiology, and weed science at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. For the experiment, a parasitic plant Dodder was introduced to the host plants tomato and arabidopsis.

 The parasite uses a specialized appendages to wrap itself around its host, before penetrating and harvesting nutrients from the hosts. A team of scientist writes, "Movement of RNAs between cells of a single plant is well documented, but cross-species RNA transfer is largely unexplored. Cuscuta pentagona (dodder) is a parasitic plant that forms symplastic connections with its hosts and takes up host messenger RNAs (mRNAs). These findings demonstrate that parasitic plants can exchange large proportions of their transcriptomes with hosts, providing potential mechanisms for RNA-based interactions between species and horizontal gene transfer." The discovery of the mRNA exchange could potentially lead to new discoveries in the fields of agriculture and plant genetics. The study was published in the Aug. 15 issue of the journal  Science.
Photo courtesy: Virginia Tech