Speaker: Simon Gilroy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, professor of botany

Title: "Do Plants Feel Pain? Systemic signaling in Arabidopsis"

Abstract: Plants lack the luxury of getting up and leaving when conditions turn bad. They are literally rooted to the spot and so have evolved remarkably sensitive systems that sense and respond to the many and varied challenges they face. Although we often think of plant responses as being slow, some stresses require rapid sensing and equally rapid plant-wide reaction. For example, local plant defenses against a caterpillar chewing on a leaf can be triggered within seconds and then, after just a few minutes, signals have moved throughout the plant to elicit preemptive defenses in undamaged leaves. The molecular machineries that make up these communication systems are now beginning to be deciphered and, just as in animals, a combination of electrical signaling and waves of chemical messengers such as calcium ions underlie the rapid communication system. We have recently been able to visualize these signals moving through the plant in real time and to define some of the molecular components that support these changes. This approach is helping reveal the signaling systems that plants use to respond to stimuli such as being touched or damaged and how they can operate at the speeds we normally assign to animal behavior.

Host: GDCB Graduate Student and Postdoc Organization (seminar contact: Zhongpeng Li, postdoctoral research associate in Aung lab)