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Plants might know when to bloom by remembering seasons
Plants might have some capacity to retain information or, in other words, to form memories, according to a biologist from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts. Susan Lindquist has discovered that a protein found in thale cress (pictured above) acts like a prion. In humans and other animals, prions or misfolded proteins cause degenerative illnesses, including mad cow and Creutzfeldt–Jakob diseases. But the protein Lindquist found, which is called Luminidependens (LD), responds to daylight and controls flowering time.
