Ben Scheres of Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Wim van der Putten, form the Netherlands Institute of Ecology & WUR conclude that by considering diversity in the plant response to the environment as the adaptation of an information-processing ‘neural network’, new directions can be found for the study of life-history strategies, trade-offs and evolution in plants.

Scheres and Van der Putten state that further research on the amazing flexibility plants show in responding to their environment may be very helpful in the efforts to effectively battle the challenges in world food production.

This is a graphic representation of the connectivity in plant growth-regulatory networks as presented by Scheres & Van der Putten. The intrinsic developmental program in plants sets up spatially restricted domains of growth-factor signalling and their response systems (upper layer of the network). Polar auxin transport (PAT) is shown as an example. Cross-talk between growth factors (brassinosteroids (BR), gibberellic acid (GA), auxin (AUX), cytokinins (CK) and ethylene(ET)) occurs through signal-transduction pathways, which form ‘hidden’ layers that integrate information by changing their activity in response to inputs.

Ultimately, the hidden layers control transcription in the output layer (bottom row). Nodes in the output layer represent genes with promoters that integrate weighted inputs from the previous layer. A single output node in the drawing may represent several genes, the encoded proteins of which control a developmental process.

By connecting this network to external signal such as light, nutrients and signals from the plant immune system, the plant can respond very specifically to the external world.

Feedback between different information-processing nodes is indicated by red lines.