A library of electrophysiological responses in plants - a model of transversal education and open science

ABSTRACT

Electrophysiology in plants is understudied, and, moreover, an ideal model for student inclusion at all levels of education. Here, we report on an investigation in open science, whereby scientists worked with high school students, faculty, and undergraduates from Chile, Germany, Serbia, South Korea, and the USA. The students recorded the electrophysiological signals of >15 plant species in response to a flame or tactile stimulus applied to the leaves. We observed that approximately 60% of the plants studied showed an electrophysiological response, with a delay of ~ 3-6 s after stimulus presentation. In preliminary conduction velocity experiments, we verified that observed signals are indeed biological in origin, with information transmission speeds of ~ 2–9 mm/s. Such easily replicable experiments can serve to include more investigators and students in contributing to our understanding of plant electrophysiology.

KEYWORDS:

• Plant electrical signals
• electrophysiology
• environmental stress
• plant physiology
• comparative physiology
• DIY science
• open science

Acknowledgments

Thanks go to “el Don” Ricardo Román, director of high school Colegio Alberto Blest Gana, for enthusiastically blessing this unique educational experience at his institution. Nour Chahin designed initial prototypes of the Python toolbox ‘spikertools’ that we used for our data loading and processing steps. Acknowledgments additionally go to our colleague Gregory Gage, who organized the opportunity to work with undergraduate students in Serbia. We also thank Daniela Flores, Kadeem Gilbert, and Christopher Harris for carefully reading and commenting on our manuscript. We finally thank Sanja Gage and apologize for disturbing her home garden plants in our initial pilot studies.

Disclosure statement

Authors TD, ESK, and TM work at the company Backyard Brains, which sells the amplifier equipment mentioned in this manuscript. Authors DM and DA were also interns for 3 months at Backyard Brains during the preparation of this manuscript after the formal class ended.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2024.2310977

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was principally supported by subsidies awarded by the government of the Republic of Chile designated for use by public high schools. Additional support was provided by the Center for the Promotion of Science in Serbia and the Nordeus Foundation.