Parameters of electrical signals and photosynthetic responses induced by them in pea seedlings depend on the nature of stimulus

Abstract

Local damage induces generation and propagation of variation potentials (VPs) that affect physiological processes in plants. The aims of the work presented here were to investigate parameters of VP induced by burning, heating and mechanical injury in pea seedlings, and to undertake a theoretical analysis of the mechanisms underlying the differences in VP parameters and a study of the photosynthetic responses caused by VPs induced by the damaging factors. The velocity of propagation of burn-induced VP decreased with distance from the damaged area whereas the velocities of heating- and injury-induced VPs were constant. The amplitudes of burn- and heating-induced VPs did not depend on distance whereas the amplitude of VP induced by mechanical injury decreased. VP propagation has been simulated on the basis of wound substance spread. The simulation revealed two possible ways of wound substance propagation: turbulent diffusion from the damaged area and secondary active production in intact cells. The photosynthetic response (decrease in the quantum yield of PSII and raising the level of non-photochemical fluorescence quenching (NPQ)) developed in case of VP entering the intact leaf under heating and burn but was not registered after mechanical injury. An increase in NPQ level was biphasic under burn in comparison with a single-phase one under heating, and the NPQ amplitude was slightly higher under burn. We suggest that differences in photosynthetic responses may be determined by the parameters of VPs induced by stimuli of different nature.

Communication and Information Theory of Single Action Potential Signals in Plants

“…(31) in the mutual information expression in Eq. (25), we arrive at the mutual information Ipn X , U q between U ptq and n X ptq is:…”

Automatic Determination of the Parameters of Electrical Signals and Functional Responses of Plants Using the Wavelet Transformation Method

“…Electrical signals and photosynthetic reactions were induced by two types of stimuli [11]. The first type of stimulation was a gradual heating simulating heat shock in natural conditions.…”

“…Burn is a strong stimulus known to inevitably cause the propagation of high-amplitude VP, and therefore this stimulus is commonly used as a standard VP inducer in laboratory conditions. A more physiological stimulus, namely, gradual local heating, also induces VP, which propagates over a long distance with greater amplitude compared to mechanical damage [11]. During VP propagation, a signal decrement is observed-the amplitude and VP propagation velocity decrease with increasing distance from the wounding area [3,6,8,12,13].…”

“…The application of these approaches in agriculture research requires the processing of large amounts of data, which can only be effective in an automatic mode. The same task is important for research on spatio-temporal mapping of signals using multi-electrode array [27] and for photosynthesis studies [11,17]. An accurate automatic detection of signal parameters, including the reaction start time, amplitude, and propagation speed is of great importance.…”

Communication in Plants: Comparison of Multiple Action Potential and Mechanosensitive Signals With Experiments

“…We have learned from the models in [9], [10], [11] that some signals in plants are informed by the phenomena of molecular communication [12], [13]. The paradigm of molecular communication is inspired by the communication among living cells as suggested in [14], [15], [16], [17], [18].…”