{"id":1941,"date":"2009-10-16T11:05:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=1941"},"modified":"2009-10-16T11:05:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-16T15:05:00","slug":"plants-smell-siblings-scale-back-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2009\/10\/16\/plants-smell-siblings-scale-back-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"Plants &#8220;smell&#8221; siblings, scale back competition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.landesbioscience.com\/journals\/27\/article\/10118\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">study out in Communicative and Integrative Biology<\/a> shows the mechanism behind plants that can recognize their own siblings.\u00a0 These plants send out fewer roots when planted next to siblings than when they\u2019re planted next to strangers, a phenomenon the researchers think lessens competition among sibs but increases competition among unrelated plants.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">The study was done in the lab of <a href=\"http:\/\/bais.dbi.udel.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Harsh Bais<\/a>, a researcher at the University of  Delaware, on the common laboratory plant <em>Arabidopsis thaliana<\/em>. Bais and his graduate student <a href=\"http:\/\/bais.dbi.udel.edu\/people\/biedrzycki.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Meredith Biedrzycki<\/a>, the lead author on the paper,\u00a0 exposed seedlings to exudates, or root secretions, of siblings and of unrelated plants.\u00a0 The plants exposed to strangers\u2019 exudates had greater lateral root formation \u2014 that is, their roots spread further away from the plant.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">The ecologists used wild-collected strains of <em>Arabidopsis <\/em>in the study to avoid the potential of lab-reared strains having unknown siblings.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting that a well-studied lab plant would show this ability to sense its siblings. It would be interesting also to know what other wild plants have this heightened sense of family. Is it common, or specific to certain groups? \u00a0Are there traits in Arabidopsis that make it a good lab plant and also give it advanced sensory capabilities?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Read the abstract <a href=\"http:\/\/www.landesbioscience.com\/journals\/27\/article\/10118\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A study out in Communicative and Integrative Biology shows the mechanism behind plants that can recognize their own siblings.\u00a0 These plants send out fewer roots when planted next to siblings than when they\u2019re planted next to strangers, a phenomenon the researchers think lessens competition among sibs but increases competition among unrelated plants. The study was done in the lab of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,2],"tags":[368,369,370],"class_list":["post-1941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecology-education","category-research","tag-arabidopsis","tag-plant-communication","tag-sensory-biology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}