Plant electrophysiology

[PatrickG]

So I was browsing scholarly articles, and came across a number of studies on plant electrophysiology, and the role of action potentials as well as the much-slower variation potentials in plant signaling. Sounds cool, I thought, but of course playing with intracellular electrodes or patch clamps are beyond the ability of most DIY Bio folks (especially this one). However, I noticed that numerous studies had used Ag/AgCl electrodes placed on the surface of the plant with conductive gel (similar to an ECG I assume?) or inserted into the plant and connected to a data acquisition device to obtain interesting whole-plant electrophysiology results. For instance, this paper describes some possible methods for measuring electrical signals. I'm most interested in the surface recordings, as they seem the most accessible for us DIYers. Anyone else interested? It seems like a fascinating, under-researched topic that is decently accessible to the home experimenter, and a decent number of experimenters could enable additional interesting investigation, such as possible correlation between stimulus and the nature of the response waveform.

What does everyone think?

PS if the link is broken for anyone (it works for me) the article is titled "Electrical signals and their physiological significance in plants" by Fromm and Lautner.

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 12:07 PM, PatrickG <pgri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds cool, I thought, but of course playing with intracellular electrodes
> or patch clamps are beyond the ability of most DIY Bio folks (especially
> this one).

Maybe you could try to build this one?

http://autopatcher.org/

"We have developed a simple robot that automatically performs patch
clamping in vivo, algorithmically detecting cells by analyzing the
temporal sequence of electrode impedance changes. We demonstrate good
yield, throughput, and quality of recording in mouse cortex and
hippocampus."

Dunno what the license is on the design, since they mention they want
to try to commercialize it.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[PatrickG]

Hm, that's interesting. Thanks, Brian! I do think that the DIY plant bio community would already have a nice amount of research to do with the (experimentally) simpler and more macroscopic surface electrode recordings. Nonetheless, single cells would be cool!

[Marc Dusseiller]

Hoi zäme,

agreed, plant electrophysiology is cool and accessible to DIY approaches. we did a workshop on the topic 1.5 years ago and put some stuff together on the hackteria wiki:

http://hackteria.org/wiki/index.php/Plant_Electrophysiology

here some impressions:

http://hackteria.org/?p=443

we got it to work in the end, using an instrumental amplifier, the line-in ADC from a laptop and a faraday cage around the plant. using venus fly traps is a bit eayier cos of relatively high voltages.

the DIY micro-pipette elctrode instrucions is still due.... i'll ask andrej to finish it :-)

good luck,

marc