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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Why talking to plants may not make you such a Charlie after all ( scientists said they had found "a set of sound-responsive genes in plants") Why talking to plants may not make you such a Charlie after all IAN JOHNSTON ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT (ijohnston@scotsman.com) WHEN Prince Charles suggested plants responded to his words of endearment, it was dismissed by many as eccentric nonsense. But now researchers in South Korea claim to have discovered evidence that the heir to the throne may have been right all along. The scientists said they had found "a set of sound-responsive genes in plants" in what other experts said would be an astonishing finding. Plants are known to respond to light, temperature, touch and vibration, and the South Korean team, led by Dr Mi-Jeong Jeong, decided to investigate whether they could also respond to sound in some way. They played classical music, such as Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Clair de Lune by Debussy and Winter from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, to a rice crop. The plants appeared unmoved. However, when single notes were played, the scientists noticed an effect on two genes known to respond to light, New Scientist magazine reports today. These became more active when exposed to a high-pitched sound and less active when a low one was played. "Although there are many reports about sound responsiveness at the physiological level, not many investigations have been performed regarding sound responsiveness at the gene level," the researchers wrote in the journal Molecular Breeding. "As far as we know, this is the first report of characterisation of plant sound-responsive genes." This might cast a different light on the comment by the Prince of Wales, who reportedly told a television interviewer in the mid-1980s: "I just come and talk to the plants, really. It's very important to talk. They respond, don't they?" Dr Jeong's team plans to look into the matter further. "Touch and sound stresses are basically very similar externally applied mechanical stresses. Although none of the known touch-inducible genes have been isolated by the methods we have performed, further investigation on how our sound- inducible genes will respond to other stresses such as touch and hormones will give an insight on the relationship between various mechanical responses," they said in the journal. They believe the means by which the plants "hear" could be used to alter the expression of a range of genes if they were genetically modified, with potential benefits for agriculture. They could, for example, be "told" to come into flower with the playing a certain note. Dr Philip Wigge, of the John Innes Centre, an internationally renowned plant science and microbiology research unit in Norwich, was sceptical but refused to dismiss the paper out of hand. "I would be astonished if plants could tell the difference [between types of music]. But you never know," he said. "This would be of large interest to the plant community in general if it were true, but it's a very big claim." Dr Wigge said vibration caused by sound waves might have something to do with the Korean team's results, but added the effect on the genes was so small it could also be "natural variation". "We know plants are responsive to wind and sense touch and vibration, so that could be having an effect," he said. Dr Wigge said people had looked "very hard" for decades for signs of something more to plants. "There was a claim that plants were sensitive and they had feelings; plants had a mood and it depended on electrical currents," he said. "All these studies, unfortunately, have never panned out." ROOTS OF PLANT EMOTION CLAIM GUSTAV Fechner is credited with the idea that plants have feelings and emotions. In the mid-19th century, the German professor said talking to plants and generally being nice to them would help them grow. In 1900, Sir Jagdish Bose concluded plants had a nervous system and would go into spasm when given a shock. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, a vegetarian, is said to have been distressed by the "violent convulsions" of a cabbage as it boiled in Sir Jagdish's lab. Others have tried to explain away some apparent effects of talking to plants by suggesting they benefited from an increase in from human breath.
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also see Findhorn experiment with plants
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