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发表于 2018-7-19 14:53:36
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Like any good parasite, the dodder seedling latches on to its host — an unfortunate tomato stalk, say, or a carrot top — and doesn’t let go. The dodder’s tiny shoot wraps around the plant and taps into it, stealing nutrients.
But dodder, which is such a pest that it has made the Agriculture Department’s list of the top 10 weeds, doesn’t rely on dumb luck to find a host. It has a nose for it.
Penn State researchers have discovered that the plant, Cuscuta pentagona, uses chemical cues from a host plant to grow toward it. A dodder seedling can even distinguish between wheat, which it ordinarily disdains, and tomato, a favorite.
Plants produce volatile chemicals that waft through the air, and it’s long been known that plant-eating insects use them to locate food sources. Less clear, said Mark C. Mescher, an assistant professor at Penn State, has been “whether neighboring plants are also receiving these cues.”
So Dr. Mescher, along with Consuelo M. De Moraes and Justin B. Runyon, grew dodder seedlings in the lab adjacent to a tomato plant, controlling for light and other factors that could affect the direction of growth. As reported in the journal Science, they found that although the shoots started growing in a typical rotating pattern, they eventually grew toward the tomato stalk.
The researchers also extracted the volatile chemicals from the tomato plants and found that the dodder shoots would grow toward the chemicals even in the absence of a plant.
While this was the first example of one plant directing its growth in response to volatiles from another, Dr. Mescher said, “we would expect it’s widespread among parasitic plants.” Parasites like dodder don’t photosynthesize, and they have a limited amount of nutrients in their seed, so a shoot must find a host quickly or it will die.
In determining why dodder shoots preferred tomato over wheat, the researchers found that one of the chemicals from wheat served as a repellent. And that, they said, offers hope for ways to fight dodder infestations. Spraying food plants with the repellent chemical, or genetically modifying them to produce the chemical on their own, may keep dodder from growing in their direction.
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