Carbon nanotubes embedded in leaves detect chemical signals
phys.org
phys.org
> "Plants have a very sophisticated form of internal communication, which we can now observe for the first time. That means that in real-time, we can see a living plant's response, communicating the specific type of stress that it's experiencing," says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.
Amazing stuff.
Also interesting to read what one of their research goals seems to be:
>One problem they hope to address is shade avoidance, which is seen in many species of plants when they are grown at high density. Such plants turn on a stress response that diverts their resources into growing taller, instead of putting energy into producing crops. This lowers the overall crop yield, so agricultural researchers are interested in engineering plants so that don't turn on that response.
I don't know much about agriculture (especially not at massive scales), but the end goal is to completely manipulate the plant for maximimum crop yield. If researchers are only now finding out about the communication pathways of plants, I'd assume there is a lot we don't know about plants and the chemical algorithms orchestrating them for almost 500 mln years. Just seems kinda naive to remove one "feature" without expecting something to malfunction at some point.