Genome complexity: Plants have memories (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, February 22, 2016, 16:00 (3198 days ago) @ David Turell

Plans can develop memories of how to handle a drought, and also lose those memories:-http://phys.org/news/2016-02-memories.html-"A small team of researchers with Australian National University Canberra, has found evidence that suggests that plants are able to reset a memory that has not been proven to be useful, in essence, forgetting things after they have been stored.-***-"Prior research has shown that plants are able to 'remember' events such as droughts, so they will not have to go through the same process of learning to survive under such conditions if another drought occurs. Other studies have shown that the process involves DNA, because some plants are able to pass on such memories to their offspring—but how such memory passing was done was mostly unknown. In this new effort, the researchers report learning not only more about how such memory processing occurs, but also how plants are able to reset if conditions change such that a memory that has been learned that is no longer useful can be eliminated.-"The researchers found that in order for a plant to create a memory, it has to create a certain protein—one that will have an impact on its own DNA, which allows for impacting future generations. It is all part of a process called RNA decay, they report, where DNA strands are transcribed into RNA, before they are translated into proteins. It is the RNA decay process that controls the amount of RNA molecules that are to be tuned into proteins—any disruption to that process prevents a memory from being formed, they note, suggesting the means by which prior memories may be eliminated. Doing so is important , they add, because holding onto memories uses resources—if a plant seed is blown into an area where a drought will never occur, for example, than it should release the memory of how to contend with one, thus conserving its energy. ( my bold)-"The team notes too that some plants also appear to have a type of short-term memory that is not related to either DNA or RNA, but thus far it is not understood, primarily, because it has not yet been studied."-Comment: Shapiro and others would view this as plant mentation, extrapolating from his view of cells. I view it as a built-in biochemical response.