According to certain studies, plants and trees have emotions—they can feel what’s happening to them and can sense what’s happening around them. Keeping that in mind, have you imagined how they stick to their routine as the seasons change? Or, simply put, can they register memories?
Yes! That’s what Sohini Chakrabortee, a leading research biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has discovered!
The Indian biologist is a postdoctoral research fellow in Susan Lindquist’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Chakrabortee, after three years of research in analyzing over 20,000 plants, finally discovered a special type of plant protein called ‘prion’ which plays a crucial role in registering environmental memories. The prions’ function in plants can be compared to neurons in humans.
Brain cells in human beings record memories by rearranging molecules in a peculiar manner. Chakrabortee through her research showed that prions in plants can also change their shape and induce shape-change to arrange protein molecules in a specific configuration to memorize events.
“This is the first evidence that a plant protein may self-replicate as a prion—this opens up the possibility of protein-based memories in plants. It is these memories that allow plants to distinguish between a single night of cold and a long winter,” the online science magazine Tecake.in quoted Chakrabortee.
