Characterizing Information Propagation in Plants

TL;DR

This paper models electrochemical communication in plants using information theory to analyze how action potentials propagate and how plant growth influences information transfer rates.

Contribution

It introduces a simple model for plant action potential generation and applies information-theoretic analysis to study information transfer and propagation speed in plants.

Findings

Mutual information varies with the number of plant cells.

Propagation speed depends on the AP signal characteristics.

Growth rate impacts information transfer rate.

Abstract

This paper considers an electro-chemical based communication model for intercellular communication in plants. Many plants, such as Mimosa pudica (the "sensitive plant"), employ electrochemical signals known as action potentials (APs) for communication purposes. In this paper we present a simple model for action potential generation. We make use of the concepts from molecular communication to explain the underlying process of information transfer in a plant. Using the information-theoretic analysis, we compute the mutual information between the input and output in this work. The key aim is to study the variations in the information propagation speed for varying number of plant cells for one simple case. Furthermore we study the impact of the AP signal on the mutual information and information propagation speed. We aim to explore further that how the growth rate in plants can impact the information transfer rate and vice versa.