Plants can memorise things. Yes, you read it correctly. Researchers found and revealed that Plants also can memorise things. According to the reports by the scientists, plants had some inbuilt memory mechanism that makes them do seasonal things repeatedly. The main reason for this memory mechanism is Prions.
Three years of research and analysis of over 20,000 plants has led to the discovery of special proteins called prions that play the role of neurons to form environmental memories. Several studies have explained that prions have the capability to store information for a long duration of time.
Human brain cells store information by rearranging molecules in a special configuration. In the same way, prions change their shape and induce shape change to arrange protein molecules in a specific configuration to memorise things.
“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,” said Sohini Chakraborty, who led the research in the laboratory of Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.
“It is these memories that allow plants to distinguish between a single night of cold and a long winter.” “When we talk about plant memories, we mean the plant that has a memory responds differently to a stimulus compared to a plant that has never experienced this before,” said Can Kayatekin, a post-doctoral associate and a member of the Whitehead-MIT team.
The current study has taken a step further and explains the role of prions in plants.