Plants could be used to study human mental illness. The researchers at Yale think it's possible. They looked at how the same genes affect behavior in mammals and plants and published their findings in June.
The senior author of the study has been thinking about this possibility for a while.
He said that years ago he became interested in the idea that all living organisms must have some resemblance to one another.
This idea kept coming back to him as he studied behavior and mitochondria. It might be possible to better understand human behavior through the study of plants if one could change the genes in animals and plants and see what changes occur. Horvath said it's possible to develop a plant with that idea.
"If you can develop a model that1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
Horvath and his colleagues studied two genes, one found in a small flowering plant and another in a mouse.
Maintaining health is dependent on the function of the Mitochondria. Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and schizophrenia are just a few of the diseases that can be caused by faulty mitochondria.
The researchers compared plants with and without the genes to better understand their roles. They found that it affects a lot of important characteristics.
Two plant behaviors were looked at by them.
There was a salt stress response. Plants can be killed by too much salt. Plants tend to stop growing when there's too much salt in the environment. These salt-avoiding behaviors are critical for the survival of the species.
Hyponastic behavior is a type of plant behavior. Light is the most important energy source for plants.
Hyponastic behaviors include the way leaves move. Its leaves are flatter during the day. The leaves angle upwards at night. Horvath and his colleagues found that FMT regulates how much and how fast the leaves move.
The researchers compared a variety of mouse behaviors to see if they were similar to those with reduced CLUH. They used a behavioral test in which mice are placed in an open environment and found that mice with less CLUH were slower and traveled shorter than their counterparts.
Horvath said that the mice had the same response as the plants. It's rudimentary, but it shows that you can have similar mechanisms in plants and animals.
He said that it was an exciting first step. Plants and mammals have the same genes and processes.
Horvath said the long-term goal was to develop a sort of dictionary that catalogs the similarities between plants and animals. This plant could serve as a model for behavioral research in the future.
More information: Alexandra Ralevski et al, Plant mitochondrial FMT and its mammalian homolog CLUH controls development and behavior in Arabidopsis and locomotion in mice, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s00018-022-04382-3 Journal information: Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences
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