Plants respond to salt as people respond to pain

Extreme winters and dry summers shape salty soil.
In some regions, the excessive dryness increases the natural salt in the soil surface, while in some seaside areas, the increase in sea level can be transformed into saline groundwater.
New studies show that plants use calcium to survive in very saline soils, which are becoming increasingly global.

Unfortunately, people have a role to play - land and water use directly affects the salinisation of the soil, and the effects of climate change on human influences also affect rainfall and air temperature patterns.
Although it seems contradictory, even watering the arable land influences the salinity of the soil - the water that is supplied to the soil always has some degree of salt, and because the plants are not able to absorb the salt, the salt concentration in the soil is constantly increasing as a result of evaporation of the water from the soil.

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Their roots are not made for walking

During cold and frosted winters, more and more salt is used to cope with the ice.
Over the past fifty years, the use of salt on the roads has grown tremendously - when in the 1960s about 3 million tons of salt was consumed in North America, this number has grown to nearly 20 million tons by now.

When spring arrives, rain water from the salt-streams of salt is transferred to the surrounding soil and the level of salinity of the soil changes. The accumulation of salt in road-to-road soils is significant.

For plants, the salt is basically a toxic substance - at the time, the tactics of "land salvation" were used by the victorious armies - and it took quite some time before anything could be grown on such soil.

Once incorporated into the soil, plants can not escape the effects of salt - so the rising salt level in the soil is a major threat to both the crop and the wider ecosystem.

Recent research by Won-Gyu Choi and his teammates at the University of Wisconsin, Gilroy, shows that calcium plays a key role in plant responses to excessive saltiness.
When the plants get salt from the soil, they respond to it with a "calcium wave" - ​​i.e. calcium ions with high concentrations.
This wave is created by releasing calcium that the plants hold in their cells.

The authors of the study used an innovative system to monitor calcium release in plant cells - by constructing plants that progressively converted fluorescent protein to calcium levels.

When they affected the root system of plants with various stimuli such as cold, touch or stress, the plants responded to this rise in calcium concentration. However, when the roots felt salt, the level of calcium increased at the point of contact, grappling with neighboring cells and moving in vegetative cells at a constant rate of two cells per second through the entire plant. 

Plants get information

When plant shoots have taken the "calcium wave" signal, reprogramming occurs in plant cells - new molecules will be produced in the cells to help the plant fight against salt, regulating the water distribution and setting the salt barrier in different parts of the plant.
The authors of the study are confident that the "calcium wave" is what caused this reaction.

Won-Gyu Choi and colleagues assumed that calcium is released from a specific part of the cell that has been stored there specifically for that purpose.
This process requires certain special proteins that form pores, which, in turn, open up in order to release calcium.

When investigating the plants in which the pore formation was completed, they discovered that the "calcium wave" no longer worked. Without the "calcium wave", these plants could no longer successfully protect themselves against salt. The growth of these plants was weaker than the plants in which the "calcium wave" worked.

The discovery of Won-Gyu Choi and his colleagues has revealed the important mechanism that plants use to combat saline growth.
The "calcium wave" that plants form in their roots to inform the whole plant that saltiness will soon reach the entire plant has a striking similarity to our nervous system.

In humans, calcium is used, for example, to exchange information between neurons when we experience some kind of stress, such as pain.
When our wound gets salt, our brain gets a signal through the "calcium wave".
It turns out that a similar system is used in the plant kingdom, but instead of the brain, a signal is sent to all the cells of the plant.

Hopefully we will be able to use this information in the future in plant protection - helping them cope better with salty soil.

Free interpretation from article: "Plants Repond to Salt Just Like Humans" to "Respond to Pain" (Op-Ed).
Link: http://www.livescience.com/45512-plants-respond-to-salt-just-like-humans-respond-to-pain.html