Abstract
Plants are complex organisms living in a changing environment and, because of that, they have to develop many strategies to perceive physical, chemical or biological stimuli to characterize their momentary environment. Our study aims to understand how plants can interact with those stimuli to communicate with other plants present in their environment. We hypothesized that this communication appears through the root system and we focused our work to apprehend the possible vectors.
First, in-vitro experimentation was developed by a group of American students in order to identify four components responsible for the communication between plants. They conclude: " this pilot study has indicated that neighbor plants communicate underground when submitted to different concentrations of nutrients".
Then, we developed models to predict the vector of the signal with two hypotheses: by an active transport through mycorrhizae or by a passive transport through diffusion in the medium. Based on the response time noticed in the American’s experiment, our results showed that the observed response happened too quickly to be explained by the communication ways we tested.