New England Carnivorous Plant Society

The February meeting of the NECPS will be held on February 20th at 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM at Briggs Nursery, North Attleboro, MA (Directions).

This meeting will feature a Show & Tell on Tuberous drosera given by NECPS Vice President Emmi Kurosawa.

A silent auction is also being planned.

The display of a smartphone reacts to finger pressure. The carnivorous Venus flytrap, on the other hand, even notices when a lightweight like a fly lands on it. Special genes make this possible.

All plant cells can be made to react by touch or injury. The carnivorous Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) has highly sensitive organs for this purpose: sensory hairs that register even the weakest mechanical stimuli, amplify them, and convert them into electrical signals that then spread quickly through the plant tissue.

Researchers from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, have isolated individual sensory hairs and analyzed the gene pool that is active in catching insects. "In the process, we found for the first time the genes that presumably serve throughout the plant kingdom to convert local mechanical stimuli into systemic signals," says JMU plant researcher Professor Rainer Hedrich.

That's a fine thing, because virtually nothing was known about mechano-receptors in plants until now. Hedrich's team presents the results in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

Read the Full Article Here

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Membership Dues are payable at or before the January meeting.

Due to the current situation of the COVID-19 virus pandemic, the 13th ICPS-conference in Himeji, Japan is postponed to May 2022. Specific information will be announced at a later time.

Scientists are continuing to tease out the mechanisms by which the Venus flytrap can tell when it has captured a tasty insect as prey as opposed to an inedible object (or just a false alarm). There is evidence that the carnivorous plant has something akin to a short-term "memory," and a team of Japanese scientists has found evidence that the mechanism for this memory lies in changes in calcium concentrations in its leaves, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature Plants.

The Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

But the Venus flytrap doesn't close all the way and produce digestive enzymes to consume the prey until the hairs are triggered three more times (for a total of five stimuli). The German scientists likened this behavior to performing a rudimentary cost-to-benefit analysis, in which the number of triggering stimuli help the Venus flytrap determine the size and nutritional content of any potential prey struggling in its maw and whether it's worth the effort. If not, the trap will release whatever has been caught within 12 hours or so. (Another means by which the Venus flytrap tells the difference between an inedible object and actual prey is a special chitin receptor. Most insects have a chitin exoskeleton, so the plant will produce even more digestive enzymes in response to the presence of chitin.)

The implication is that the Venus flytrap must have some sort of short-term memory mechanism in order for that to work, since it has to "remember" the first stimulation long enough for the second stimulation to register. Past research has posited that shifts in the concentrations of calcium ions play a role, although the lack of any means to measure those concentrations, without damaging the leaf cells, prevented scientists from testing that theory.

That's where this latest study comes in. The Japanese team figured out how to introduce a gene for a calcium sensor protein called GCaMP6, which glows green whenever it binds to calcium. That green fluorescence allowed the team to visually track the changes in calcium concentrations in response to stimulating the plant's sensitive hairs with a needle.

Read the Full Article Here

The carnivorous plant Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) captures and digests small animals and absorbs nutrients with its characteristic insectivorous leaves. Six sensory hairs on the inner surface of each leaf sense a visiting prey and cause the trap to close. A single contact event with a sensory hair is not sufficient, but a second contact within 30 seconds will induce the trap to close quickly and ensnare the unlucky prey. Thus, Venus flytraps store the memory of the first stimulus for about 30 seconds. But how does a plant memorize anything when it has no brain or nervous system?

In 1988, Dr. Dieter Hodick and Dr. Andreas Sievers from the Botanical Institute at the University of Bonn, Germany speculated that changes in calcium ions might be involved in the memory of the Venus flytrap. However, lacking the technological means to measure calcium concentrations without damaging the cells, they were unable to explore this possibility.

Now, in a study to be published in Nature Plants, a graduate student Mr. Hiraku Suda and Professor Mitsuyasu Hasebe of the National Institute for Basic Biology (NIBB) in Okazaki, Japan, together with their colleagues, have succeeded in visualizing intracellular calcium concentrations in the Venus flytrap and have demonstrated that its short-term memory can indeed be explained by changes in calcium concentration.

The research team first established a genetic transformation method for the Venus flytrap. They then introduced the gene encoding the intracellular calcium sensor protein GCaMP6, which emits green fluorescence when bound to calcium, into the insectivorous plant, allowing them to visualize changes in intracellular calcium concentrations for the first time.

To visualize the flytrap's memory mechanism, Dr. Hasebe and his colleagues spliced a special type of gene into the plant. This gene, widely used in biology, produces a protein that turns fluorescent green when it binds to a target - in this case, a calcium ion.

Read the Full Article Here