What's Gotten Into You by Dan Levitt

Author:Dan Levitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Even then plants faced unnerving challenges. In fact, if you stop to think about it, you may wonder how they survive at all. To make it in this world, they have to begin their lives by taking a stand. They must commit to living out their days in a single spot, with no option to change their minds, much less flee. They are forced to cope with constant changes in light and the seasons. Though wind, rain, snow, and hail lash them, and water turns to ice, they can’t run for shelter. They must confront drought, floods, and competitors for minerals and light. Then ravenous creatures arrive. Yet, like Spartan warriors, plants remain rooted to the patches of ground they’ve claimed. They survive only through their wily defenses and their remarkable ability to eke out nutrients from within their reach. In other words, to create the world from which we arise, plants needed to develop an extraordinarily important quality, one that would prove as crucial as any other to their success: they had to become insanely adaptable to whatever fate throws at them.

They learned to do that, first, by turning into biochemical geniuses. Unlike animals, plants produce hundreds of thousands of complex molecules that are not for internal use. They deploy them to fend off competitors, attract pollinators, communicate, and scare creatures that want to devour them. In plants’ fight for survival, chemicals are their weapons of choice. (They are particularly good at poisoning animals.) That’s why they make so many of our drugs, such as salicin, a relative of aspirin (found in the bark of willow trees), the cancer fighter Taxol (in yew trees), and the malaria drug quinine (in the Andean cinchona tree). To mess with the brains of predatory insects, plants make dopamine, acetylcholine, GABA, and the serotonin precursor 5-hydroxytryptophan: all neurotransmitters also found in our brains. To drive off insects and other animals, plants synthesize nicotine, caffeine, morphine, and opium. “Why do plants make cocaine?”31 the biochemist Tony Trewavas asked rhetorically. “Can you imagine what it’s like for an insect to chew those leaves? What you find, of course, is that most insects decide not to chew those leaves.” And the spices that we use to flavor our food? Plants produce most of them, as well, to keep animals and microbes at bay.

How could plants have learned to make so many compounds? In the early 2000s, scientists found one part of the answer. Researchers were decoding the genomes of organisms for the very first time by sequencing and counting their genes. Many expected that because humans are so sophisticated and intelligent, we would have at least 100,000 genes.32 They were shocked to discover that we have far fewer, only about 24,000 (the latest count is lower still). When a similar effort by twenty international institutions first decoded the genome of a plant, geneticists expected to find that “simple” plants have far fewer genes than we do. But in the first plant genome they decoded, belonging to a small, fast-growing weed called thale cress, they counted 25,498 genes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.