The power of ionic movements in plants

TL;DR

The paper explores how ionic movements and new optogenetic tools help study electrical signals in plants, particularly in the Venus flytrap.

Contribution

The paper introduces new optogenetic tools for noninvasive control of plant membrane potential and ionic signals.

Findings

Optogenetic tools allow remote control of membrane potential and ionic messengers in plants.

These tools can help study local and long-distance information management in plant signaling.

Abstract

The movement of ion‐driven electrogenic events known as plant action potentials in the Venus flytrap Dionaea muscipula has first been recognized in Darwin's time. Besides electrophysiological techniques making use of current‐ and voltage‐recording electrodes, today an ever‐growing spectrum of tools has become available, that  report online changes in membrane potential and ion concentration. This represents a big step forward, particularly in comparison to the ‘dark’ times when calcium‐signaling studies could not take advantage of Ca2+ reporters. Very recently, the first tools from a potpourri of light‐gated ion channels routinely used in neurobiology took the plant signaling field to a new level. This kind of genetically encoded, noninvasive opto‐tools can be activated by light and provide for remote controlling the membrane potential and ionic second messengers such as Ca2+ and H+. In future studies, such optogenetic tools in combination with the appropriate reporters for ionic and electrical impulses will allow studying membrane‐delimited early steps in plant signal transduction. Moreover, this toolbox will help us tackle the question of how, for example, Ca2+ and/or electrical signatures are assessed in terms of local and long‐distance information management.

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