Plants Do Maths to Ensure Food Supply Through the Night: Study

A latest study published in the journal eLife reveals that plants do complex arithmetic calculations to ensure steady food supply through the night.

A team of scientists from John Innes Centre in Norfolk found that in the absence of sunlight, plants use formulas to calculate how much starch reserves to use in the night that will keep them going till the next sunrise.  This finding is the first example in nature of plants carrying out complex arithmetic calculations.

The researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing 'Arabidopsis,'  a flowering plant in the mustard family.

"This is the first concrete example in a fundamental biological process of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation," said mathematical modeler Professor Martin Howard from the John Innes Centre.

A mechanism within the flower leaf measures the amount of starch in storage and calculates the amount of time the plant has until dawn with the help of an internal clock that is just like the internal clock within a human body.

When the plants do not have sufficient starch they face starvation and their growth gets arrested.

"The capacity to perform arithmetic calculation is vital for plant growth and productivity," Professor Alison Smith, a metabolic biologist who helped make the discovery, told the Telegraph. "The calculations are precise so that plants prevent starvation but also make the most efficient use of their food. If the starch store is used too fast, plants will starve and stop growing during the night. If the store is used too slowly, some of it will be wasted."

On carefully studying Arabidopsis, the researchers noticed that when they altered the duration of lighting either to increase or shorten the duration of darkness, the plant was able to speed or slow down the rate at which it used starch to sustain it throughout the dark time until light.

The researchers proposed that the amount of starch stored and the time until dawn is encoded in the concentration of two different kinds of molecules known as S for starch and T for time.

Knowing this mechanism, scientists hope that this can be used to increase crop productivity.