Debrecen4U September 29, 2025

Debrecen researchers are testing if plants can exhibit Pavlovian reflexes

A groundbreaking step in understanding how plants adapt and “learn” from their environment. Researchers from the Faculty of Agriculture, Food Sciences, and Environmental Management, Center for Agricultural Genomics and Biotechnology, investigated memory and the ability of plants to learn through association.

The article presenting the results was published in the internationally recognized scientific journal Plant Signaling & Behavior.

“Plant memory is an adaptive mechanism for plants that they can use to increase their physical condition and cope with adverse environmental stresses. If a plant encounters an environmental stimulus, it reacts to it while starting to form memories of the event, which can develop into short-term or long-term somatic memory or even hereditary memory. These memories enable the plant to cope more effectively with future, recurring stress events,” scientific advisor Judit Dobránszki explained to hirek.unideb.hu.

The head of the Agricultural Genomics and Biotechnology Center (AGBK) emphasized that the study examined transcriptional memory in plants—an altered transcriptional response following stress, regulated by temporary epigenetic changes.

“At the molecular level of plant memory, the chromatin and transcriptome layers can be distinguished. In our study, we examined the formation and maintenance of short-term (a few days or weeks) somatic transcriptional memory in tomatoes after treatment with ultrasound and drought stimuli. We examined the effects of repeated stimuli. After the application of both stimuli, gene transcription and DNA methylation of tomato plants changed. By examining selected target genes, we demonstrated that the plants memorized the stimuli for 5-10 days in a gene- and stimulus-dependent manner. Repeated application of the stimuli caused various altered gene transcription behaviors, such as habituation, long-term induction, or modified re-induction,” said scientific researcher Dóra Farkas, at AGBK.

Since only a few international experimental data predicted the possibility of associative learning in plants, the researchers also examined this ability of plants.

“After the plants were previously ‘trained’ with combined stimuli, the conditioned plants were able to use one conditioned stimulus as a ‘predictor’ of the other, unconditioned stimulus. We found that in a gene-dependent manner, even ultrasound or even a drought signal can function as an unconditioned stimulus. Our experiments proved that, similarly to Pavlov’s dog, the tomato plant was able to associate the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus, i.e., the plants were able to use their transcriptional memory associatively,” the head of the research group, Judit Dobránszki, explained. 

Dóra Farkas added that the discovery of the still hidden abilities of plants based on memory function, especially in the field of training and conditioning, can contribute to increasing the resistance of plants to stress and to the sustainable agricultural utilization of plant memory.

Source:dehir.hu | Photo credit:Pixabay