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Plants don't have eyes, but they can sense light. Just as plant cells have totipotency-cells in every part of a plant have the potential to grow into a complete plant, plants have "photoreceptors" all over their bodies that can sense light, and the whole plant is equivalent to a "compound eye."

Sunlight is not only a nutrient for plants, but also an important environmental factor affecting their growth and development. Scientists define plant vision as the ability of plants to sense light, breaking the "animal vision stereotype" that eyes or photoreceptors are necessary for vision.

Recently, a team led by Lin Yi, a researcher at the School of Earth and Space Sciences of Peking University, published a paper on Advanced Science, proposing a new plant vision hypothesis-plant visual function-structural compound eye model. Previously, scientists have also used the concept of vision to explain plant phototropism and other behaviors, but the new study is the first to look at plants as a whole to study their visual functions.

Plant vision is a novel interdisciplinary branch of botany and vision science whose research can solve some puzzling mysteries about the nature of life.

Earlier, scientists observed that plants tend to grow in the direction of sunlight and called this effect phototropism or "shadow avoidance." In addition, we are familiar with the sunflower facing the sun, morning glory flowering at dawn, water lily closing petals in the evening and other phenomena, in fact, are plant visual performance.

With the improvement of technical conditions, scientists have discovered many photosensitive systems (also known as photoreceptors) that can respond differently to different colors of light, such as phytochrome, cryptochrome and phytochrome.

In 2016, scientists discovered that by using monocular-based vision, it was possible to use the leaves of one plant to mimic the behavior of the leaves of another. This is obviously a more detailed study of plant vision.

Because of the clairvoyance and complexity of human and higher animal eyes, scientists study plant vision by comparing it to the visual systems of lower animals, insects, and trying to clarify the evolutionary thinking.

Many insects have a compound eye visual system. With compound eyes, insects can obtain extremely large fields of vision, as well as images with low aberration, low distortion, high temporal resolution and infinite depth of field. Plants have photoreceptors in their branches, tendrils, trunks, and even new shoots, so in the new study, scientists boldly compared plant vision to the compound eye system of insects.

In this study, scientists thought that the different sizes of stems, branches and leaves correspond to the "small eyes" of compound eyes. Each "small eye" has multiple cells that can sense ultraviolet light, blue light, green light, red light, infrared light, and polarized light, respectively.

Plants themselves have a layered branching structure: branches diverge, petals and leaves grow layer by layer. Similarly, compound eye sensing patterns are layered. Two adjacent parts of a leaf are a hierarchy, and the plant as a whole is a hierarchy.

When the human eye receives visual images, it uses the optic nerve to transmit information to the brain. Similarly, plants have processes for information transmission and processing. Scientists have found that the process of plant information transmission is also hierarchical, the communication between two adjacent parts of a leaf is a level, and the information transmission based on the branching of the plant itself is also a level.

In addition, crown shyness is a physiological behavior of plants. In this study, scientists observed that the crown responded to specific stimuli in both horizontal and vertical directions. This result is functionally consistent with panoramic visibility of the compound eye vision model.

Compound eye vision system and intelligent algorithm We can think that the plant vision system is a transition from the algae vision system. In this process, to achieve the improvement of visual function, we need to upgrade the visual information transmission and processing path, that is, the optimization of swarm intelligence algorithm.

In addition to the canopy avoidance behavior simulated in this study, the new model may in the future explain complex behaviors such as sensing light attenuation, achieving negative phototropism, and locating host plants.

In other words, the plant visual function-structure compound eye model can trace the visual evolution process of living things on the one hand, and provide inspiration for future science and technology on the other hand, bringing intelligent algorithms or breakthroughs in bionics.

References:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/advs.202303399

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