Event

CSM Seminar – Yasmine Meroz – Plant Tropisms as a Window on Emergent Memory and Computation in Distributed Systems

Date

Monday, January 8, 2024
15:00 - 16:00

Abstract

Plants survive in a harsh and fluctuating environment, optimising their search for fluctuating nutrients, and predicting danger. They achieve this through complex response processes, such as decision-making, based on memory, or the capability to accumulate and compare past stimuli. For example, a plant shoot accumulates sensory information from various fluctuating light sources, decides which direction yields consistently most light for photosynthesis, and grows in that direction. Here we propose a reverse-engineering approach to investigating the underlying rules for the accumulation and integration of sensory inputs. Our theoretical model, based on response theory, predicts that plants respond to the sum of stimuli at short timescales, and to the difference in stimuli at longer timescales. We confirm this experimentally, and suggest that this process may be essential for navigational problem-solving capabilities of plants.

Organiser

Computational Soft Matter, Soft Matter group

Venue

LAB42

Room number

L0.06

Category

Group Seminar

Topics

biophysics, soft matter

Speakers

Yasmine Meroz

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