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Go figure – scientists at the John Innes Research Centre in Norfolk, UK, have discovered that plants can calculate their food resources during the night – dividing their starch by the number of hours of darkness to ensure they don’t run our of food before morning. Sounds like a kid with just enough jellybeans to last through the night.
If they use too little starch at night, then those food resources are wasted but if they use too much and run out, they struggle to start producing food again when morning sunlight arrives.
Metabolic biologist Professor Alison Smith says: ‘The capacity to perform arithmetic calculation is vital for plant growth and productivity – the calculations are precise so that plants prevent starvation but also make the most efficient use of their food.’
Scientists tested Arabidopis, a plant in the mustard plant family, and found that as they changed the number of hours of darkness, the plants were able to speed up or slow down the rate at which they used starch to make it last through until sunrise.
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