Plants exchange risk alerts with each other

When Harsh Bais, a botanist at the University of Delaware, emailed Connor Sweeney to tell the high school student he would be willing to mentor him on a research project, Sweeney, a competitive swimmer, was so ecstatic he could have swum another 200-meter butterfly at practice.

“I knew I would have a lot to learn, but I was ready for that,” says the 18-year-old from Wilmington, Delaware. Two years and dozens of experiments later, Sweeney, now a senior at Charter School of Wilmington, is the first author of a research article published in Frontiers in Plant Science, a leading scientific journal a rare achievement for a high school student.

What Sweeney and Bais discovered at UD may make you think differently from now on when you mow the lawn or the cat starts noshing on your houseplants. In studies of Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as mustard weed, the team found that when a leaf was nicked, the injured plant sent out an emergency alert to neighboring plants, which began beefing up their defenses.

“A wounded plant will warn its neighbors of danger,” says Bais, who is an associate professor of plant and soil sciences in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. “It doesn’t shout or text, but it gets the message across. The communication signals are in the form of airborne chemicals released mainly from the leaves.”

Sweeney delved into work in Bais’ lab at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute after school, on weekends and during summer breaks, culturing an estimated thousand Arabidopsis plants for experiments. Seeds were placed in petri plates and test tubes containing agar, a gelatinous growing medium. Each batch of seeds would germinate after about six days, transforming into delicate-stemmed three-inch plants with bright-green leaves.

One day in the lab, Sweeney put two plants a few centimeters apart on the same petri plate and made two small cuts on the leaf of one to simulate an insect’s attack. What happened next, as Sweeney says, was “an unexpected surprise.” The next day, the roots on the uninjured neighbor plant had grown noticeably longer and more robust with more lateral roots poking out from the primary root.

“It was crazy I didn’t believe it at first,” Bais says. “I would have expected the injured plant to put more resources into growing roots. But we didn’t see that.” Bais asked Sweeney to repeat the experiment multiple times, partitioning the plants to rule out any communication between the root systems. In previous research, Bais had shown how soil bacteria living among the roots can signal leaf pores, called stomata, to close up to keep invasive pathogens out.