1 de octubre de 2013

[WHAT A PLANT KNOWS WEEK 1]

1.1

INTRODUCTION

Hi, welcome to What a plant knows. If by chance you clicked on the wrong course, go back and get to the course you want because this is What a plant knows. And we're going to start this class a little differently than many other classes that you've probably taken. So, what I want you to do is, put down your pencils. Sit comfortably in the chair. If you can, turn down the lights in your room. Okay? Now, sit down, take a deep breath in. [SOUND] Now, take a breath out. [SOUND] Another breath, in. [SOUND] And another breath, out [SOUND]. You can even close your eyes if you want, going to relax a bit more, another breath in [SOUND], And another breath out [SOUND]. Now, as you're slowly breathing, imagine that there's been concrete poured in your room, and it's going all around your feet. Now take a breath in [SOUND], and a breath out [SOUND]. Now as this concrete is around your feet, it's slowly, slowly drying, and you're trying to move your feet, but they're stuck. You can't move them. Take another breath in [SOUND], and another breath out [SOUND]. You're trying to move your feet, but you're cemented in place. Now, as you're cemented in place in your room, start to think how is this going to affect your life? Another breath in [SOUND] and another breath out [SOUND]. So now, that you are all cemented where you are. I want you to take a second, and on the screen now, type in what type of problem you think you would have in your life, if you couldn't move, if you were always cemented in place. Keiko from Tokyo wrote in, well [LAUGH], that she couldn't go to the bathroom. You know, that would really be a problem or you could go to the bathroom, but you're stuck in place. How would that affect your life? So here we see Klaus from Germany wrote in that you know, he'd be hungry and thirsty and he couldn't get food or couldn't find water. Tom, from Pittsburgh came in, they said he be
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cold, hot, you know, he couldn't get a sweater. You know, how would we deal with changes in temperature if we couldn't move? And well, I won't even say who wrote this but someone else wrote in that there would be a problem with sex. Or let's say, look at it from a more biological point of view, how could we reproduce, if we couldn't move. Well if you haven't understood this, these are all problems that plants have, because actually, the biggest difference between plants and animals, are that plants are sessile organisms. They can't move. They're literally rooted in place, just like you would be if you were cemented. You know, if you think about it if you have a problem. Let's say, you're hot or you're cold. You can go to the closet, get a sweater. You could turn on, the air conditioner or you could catch a plane down to Florida in the middle of the winter to, to escape the cold. But plants, they can't do that, they can't escape. They are stuck where they are. And because of this, all of plant biology is quite complex to allow them to change their own development, their growth, in order to survive stuck in one place. So on a very basic biological level, plants are often more complex than animals are. And as we'll learn in this class, plants have to know and I'm going to use air quotes quite a lot here, Plants have to know what their surrounding are. They have to feel the weather. They have to be able to know where the light is. The have to be able to see where the light is. They have to be able to feel if something is touching them. How do they do that? That's what we're going to be learning in this course.

1.2

OUR LIFE AND PLANTS

But before we get into the more complex biology. I'm going to talk a little bit more about plant biology. Why should we be studying plants in general? Well, first of all. and I hope this is obvious to most of us, plants are the source of all Oxygen and all the Carbon in the world. You know, we can't live without plants. They produce everything we breathe, everything we eat. The clothes I wear, the chairs we sit
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on, the fuel we burn in our cars, the drugs we take; everything that we have is based by plants. You know plants are actually large type, in a large sense we can relate to them as sort of, as factories that produce chemicals for us. For example Vitamin C, we can't produce it, but plants do. And that's why we drink orange juice. Vitamin A, carotene. Caffeine, how many of you had coffee this morning? Tea? You know, we really enjoy our Caffeine. We can't make it. The plants take light and in their leaves they make these chemicals that we all use. Morphine, as pain killer, THC which from marijuana. All of these things are made by plants where they take light, they take water and they make these chemicals for us. So that's the first reason we need to study plants because it's really all of our life around us is dependent on it. But you might not have thought of this, but plants have affected all of human history. So think of what plant do you think has had the greatest influence on history, or on your life personally. And I'm going to give you a couple of options here. We can look at wheat, Potato, yams, poppy, the mulberry tree, cotton, or the rubber tree. So take a second, think about these plants, and fill in on your screen which one do you think has most affected human history? Alright so now that you've put in your answer, lets see what everyone else thought. As you could see the majority of people thought wheat. But there are people who picked each one of these options. So let's go briefly through each one and at the end you'll have a chance to change your answer if you want. So wheat, why wheat? Well, 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the fertile crescent, Mesopotamia, from Iraq up through Turkey, Syria, down in through present day Israel, some nomadic farmer, some nomadic, sorry, it wasn't a farmer even yet some nomadic gatherer or hunter had the wherewithal to gather some of the wild wheat. That was growing there in the fertile crescent to save the seeds and to plant that the next year. This was the first crop that was ever cultivated. And it was actually the cultivation of wheat, allowed for, all of modern history. because the cultivation of wheat, allowed for people to plan for their food. It allowed for the first communities. It allowed for written history. And everything that all of modern history that proceeded from it, was because of the cultivation of wheat. Later in
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life, later in history, also rice was cultivated, corn was cultivated, other animals were cultivated, other plants. But Wheat was the first plant that was cultivated to allow modern agriculture. The Mulberry bush. What's the importance of the mulberry bush? The mulberry bush actually is the only food of the silk worm. And the importance of silk worm in history was of course the rout to the east, that Marco Polo found the east. And the trade with the east opened up the whole world connecting west and east that obviously affected modern history. How about the Opium Poppy? Well I guess you can understand how the Opium Poppy affected history. One, it allowed for the first analgesic, pain killers, which you know has affected all of modern medicine. But it also affects modern history with the drug problem. So of course there is the one plant making one chemical affecting both good thing and bad things in human history. How about the Potato? How has that history? And I'm not really going to talk here about McDonald's. The potato affected history because of the Irish potato famine. In the 19th century, there was only one strain of potato growing in all of Ireland. And the Fusarium fungus attacked this potato wiping out for several years the potato crops in, in Ireland. This led to the huge famine, which led to death of a million people, and to the immigration of another million people to other countries in Europe and to North America. One of these people were the family of John Kennedy. This obviously effected modern history. How about cotton? How has that effected modern history? Well of course, modern cotton has effected us by what we wear. You know, if you like wearing blue jeans, if you like wearing nice t-shirts. Cotton, actually, though, the, the need for cotton, was one of the impetuses for the importing of slaves from Africa to the, to the new world to North America. You need slaves for the labour intensive, work in the cotton fields. This also led to the industrial revolution eventually, and it's affected history today. That we for example, Michelle Obama, who is a descendent of African slaves who are brought to North America.
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The Rubber tree, how's the rubber tree effected it? Well, if any of you have ever gone on an airplane, if you've flown anywhere. That you're dependent on the rubber tree because the rubber that comes from the rubber tree natural, natural rubber. Is the only source or is the only material that airplane wheels can be made of. There is no synthetic rubber, there's no synthetic type of plastic that can match the characteristics of natural rubber. So without rubber, we would have no airplanes. Last one, Yams. Now I'm not talking here about sweet potatoes, I'm talking about yams. How yams actually affected our history. Well I think you'll probably be surprised to know that yams led to the development of the modern birth control pill. Because yams contain a vital Estrogen and it was from yams that they first isolated this Estrogen that was the source for the first birth control pill. I think this has obviously affected many of our lives. So now that we've gone all through these again, take another second and refill out this the survey. Which of these plants do you think has affected your life the best? So, I think you can see that really, our entire life is affected by plants. Whether it's by the coffee we drink, I mean how many of you drink they say 2 cups of coffee a day, I know, I do. You know, just for me in the world there are 15 coffee trees that need to be grown to supply me with my 2 cups a day. We multiply that by all the coffee drinkers in the world, think how much coffee we need to grow in order to supply that need. If there are any musicians among you. You know the wood that goes into a Stradivarius Violin, or to a Martin Guitar, completely affects what type of tone you get. It's because of the characteristics of the wood that can't be matched by anything made out of plastic, or that's synthetic. Or a natural wood basketball court. Or Aspirin for example. It comes from a plant product. So our entire life is really completely dependent on plants. So, the next assignment is, I want you to go into the forum and write down what plants could you not live without and why. And we'll discuss this in the forum.

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1.3 PLANTS AND BIOLOGY RESEARCH

But not only are plants important for history. Of course plants are an excellent model for basic science. I want to give three examples of scientists who use plants as their model system. The first one here, and I hope you can recognize him, is Charles Darwin. Now, you all know Darwin from evolutionary theory. But you'll be surprised to know that for much of his life Darwin carried out research on plants. And we're going to use Darwin quite often and his works in this class. Actually, the last 20, 30 years of his life Darwin only studied plants and plant movements. And Darwin was one of the first people to ask the question. What does a plant see? This second person here, I think you might recognize him also. That's Gregor Mendel. The father of modern genetics. You know, this, this monk and his peas really founded the basis of all modern genetic, research, which affects not only agriculture, but also modern medicine. Barbara McClintock was a botanist. She got her PhD in plant biology, in botany. She did huge amount of work in cytogenetics. She discovered many, many of the modern principles of genetics. Most importantly, in the early 1950's, she discovered something called transpozons. Barbara McClintock discovered that pieces of DNA, can move in the genome. And this was going against the whole paradigm, that the genome was immutable, was unchangeable. Unfortunately, her work wasn't accepted at that time. She was actually quite derided for her ideas, and she stopped publishing on it. Now you could say, maybe this is 'cause she was a woman; maybe 'cause the idea was so new; maybe it's 'cause she was a plant biologist But the kicker to this is in 1983, she got the Nobel Prize for her finding. She's the only woman to receive the Nobel Prize in medicine, on her own, without anyone else joining in with her. Because we know that what she discovered using corn, in the early 50s, is now the basis for many of the cancers that humans get.
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So we can see here that plants are not only important for history, they're not only important for what we breathe, but they're important for all of biology. And the reason for this is that plants are part of the tree of life. Two billion years ago and we'll get into this a bit later in the class, both animals and plants originated from the same unicellular organisms. So much of the biology that we find in animals is also shared with plants. And we'll be talking about that quite a lot in this course. The other reason for studying plants is that they are a unique biological system. You know, if you look at all of these beautiful plants that we see around us, you know, flowers, trees, cactuses... It's just wonderful, it's amazing, you know, how do we make a flower or how do plants make flowers? How do we make these beautiful symetrical things? How does a sequoia tree manage to get the water from it's roots up almost 100 meters into the ground?. You know, we look at this flower here it's over a meter in diameter, whereas this tree growing in Yosemite National Park survives with very, very little water. How do they manage to do this? These are incredible biological questions that plant scientists are asking today, some of which we're going to talk about during the course.

1.4 PLANTS AND FOOD SECURITY

The last reason and I think maybe this might be the most important one that we need to know how plants survive, how plants work, is that we need to feed the world. You know, we need to realize that out of 7 billion people in the world today, this might be a little scary, less than half get the amount of food and the amount of nutrition they need. Over half the world, is what we called Insecure, food insecure. Now this is not only people who are hungry. You know, the pictures of children with large stomachs. But about a third of the world that get enough food in terms of volume, but not enough food in terms of nutrition. And now we have a new problem in the world that quite a lot, over 10%, are actually getting too much calories, they're overweight. So less than half the world is food insecure.
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800 million people go hungry each day. And the majority of these hungry people we know is in either Africa or in Southern Asia. Why is there so much hunger? Well, one of the reasons is that our population of humans in the world is rapidly expanding. Actually, logarithmically. If when I was born, there were only 3 billion people in the world. When my parents were born, there were 2 billion. And when my grandparents were born, only 1 billion. Today there are 7 billion people and most models have us reaching 9 billion by 2050.

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So there's huge increase in the human population. This increase in population of course, is leading to a decrease in the amount of land that's available for agriculture and this, of course, makes sense. As we have more people, they have to live somewhere. That land that used to be used for growing crops is now used for people. So, we have this contradiction, that as the amount of population goes up, the amount of land is going down. So that while 24% of the Earth's surface is arable by 2050, that's only going to be 20%. How are we going to be able to feed the world, with less land, land that world that's hotter, less water might have less nutrients available, and an increasing population?. Well, I believe, that plant biology can go a long way to solve these problems. Because plant biologists, by understanding how plants sense the environment, by understanding what a plant knows, we can develop plants that are resistant to drought or tolerant to drought. We can develop plants that need less water, less fertilizer. We can develop plants that are more resistant to pathogens, such as fungus and bacteria or bugs, insects. And we can make plants that are more nutritious. You know, a single gene, can really lead to a plant that is resistant to drought. Here we see in this picture, an experiment done in a laboratory, of course, where you're growing a plant. On the bottom we have the plant that's normal. And as it goes through a drought you see it turns yellow and wilts. And
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even if you re-water it, it doesn't come back to life. By adding a single gene to this plant, we see that it still wilts, but it wilts slower. But then when you re-water it, it

comes back to life. Now if we could figure how to employ this technology in agriculture, what effect could it have in the world? For example, in the big droughts that were in North America last year, that could really save crops, increase yield and help feed the world. Another way that plant biologists are doing this, is by utilizing what we called Wild plants. As we mentioned with wheat, wheat was cultivated from a wild-growing wheat. And in Israel today, this wild wheat is still growing. We call this the mother of wheat. It grows wild on the side of the road. What some of my colleagues have been able to do, is to take this wild wheat and cross it with a cultivated wheat. And what they've developed is a new strain that is actually heartier, it contains more
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protein and it contains more minerals. So think about this, by just utilizing what we know in plant biology, we can develop a strand of wheat that is more nutritious. And so how could this affect world security? I think that you'd agree with me that this could be very very important. But there's another reason for studying plants. Plants make us happy. Loads of psychological research, have shown that not only we're in a better mood when plants are around us, but also more productive. But for those of you who might be interested in more practical aspects of life, there are other reasons to study plants and that's that plants can be a bioreactor for fuels. Think about the money that would be involved in making bio-fuel, ecologically valid fuels from plants. We can now manipulate the oil and sugar content of plants for our own uses and so that plants can become our own oil industry. Think of the millions if not billions of dollars involved in this.

1.5 PLANT BIOLOGY

So, as we're going through the course, I want you to think of a couple major themes that we're going to talk about in plant biology. First that there's a hierarchy of organization. On all levels of biology, in all levels of plant biology, we see hierarchy. We can look at the individual cell. Or we can look, break the cell down and see what the cell is made of. Or we could put the cell together to make organs such as leaves. Put the leaves and the trunks together to make a plant. Or even have a complete ecosystem. And at each level we can learn something new about how the plant works. The cell is the basic structure of plant biology. It's the basic structure of all biology. And a lot of what we understand how a plant works, we understand by understanding how a plant cell works. We're going to be dealing a lot with evolution. Now you're not going to need to know, have any background in genetics, or background in molecular biology, but we're going to talk about Evolution and DNA. To understand that
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what we see in modern plants is a result of their genes. It's a result of changes through evolution. Now in each of these levels, there's what we call structure and function. For example, if we look at a leaf. What's it's function? I think we all know the function of the leaf is to absorb the light, the energy that a plant needs for photosynthesis. So what's it's structure? It's flat, in order to absorb all that light. But what's the structure of a leaf in a cactus? It's a thorn. And it has a different structure, because its function is different. It's actually tried to conserve area. It doesn't want to lose water. So it's minimilized its leaf. So everything we see about a plant, its structure, serves a particular function. And the function helped. the selection through evolution to the modern forms of plants that we see. And at every level, there's an interaction between the individual and its environment. Now this is obvious when we talk about ecology. When we see a plant, a tree, in its ecosystem, we'll learn about how plants communicate. How they interact. Plant, one plant to a second plant. Do they actually communicate with each other? Can we say they're talking to each other? Where there's communication not only between individuals, but there could be communication between leaves. Or there could be communication between cells. Or communication between parts of cells. So at each level, there's an interaction between the individual and its environment. Now plants have a huge amount of diversity. I mean, look at all of these flowers. All of these flowers are formed by the same basic genes, but slight changes in how they're regulated gives us this beautiful diversity of plant biology. But because the genetic basis of flower development is the same, we see a unity in plant form, and a unity in plant biology. Now in this course we can't deal with the thousands of types of plants. But what we're going to learn about will be true for let's say 95% of them, because of this unity. And all of this is connected to evolution. You cannot understand biology without understanding evolution. The modern form of a plant really shows how the plant evolved through millions of years of selective pressures. But not only have selected pressures affected plants, human pressures have selected plants. I just want to give one example here.
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So this picture here in the middle, this is wild mustard. It grows you know in fields in many parts of the world. But broccoli and cauliflower, and kale, and brussels sprouts and other brassica vegetables, all evolved from wild mustard, because of the intervention of humans. We selected for a wild mustard that might have a little head growing on it, a naturally occurring mutant and we turned that into modern broccoli by our own selection. Actually genetically. Broccoli and wild mustard are essentially identical, slight changes in one or two genes. The same thing with cauliflower. Actually in the lab, we can take a model plant that's like wild mustard and by changing one gene, cause it to make little broccolis at its end. So you could get a huge change in form, by a very slight change in the DNA.

1.6 SCIENTIFIC PROCESS

How does science work? How do scientists like myself and the people we're going to be learning about come to conclusions? Now I want to differentiate between, here, between facts and the process. Scientific facts can change. Unfortunately,
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you're going to be tested upon facts, but you need to know that some of these facts, may not really be facts. We saw that, for example, with Barbara McClintock, who discovered, against what people had thought, against popular idea, that the DNA can change. Originally, her facts were not believed. But now we know that that really is a scientific fact, that DNA can change. So what is the process of biology? Well, there's two general processes. Two general approaches to science. One I'll call discovery science. This uses induction. This is what Darwin did when he went out on the Beagle. He didn't have any grand hypothesis. He started collecting data and based on this data, through induction, he developed new theories and new hypotheses which then could lead to experiments. This is the same type of approach that used in the modern genome project, where they're developing huge or gathering huge amounts of data. Huge collections of gene sequences. Without any real hypothesis. The hypothesis comes from analyzing the data. But the approach used by most scientists is what I would call the deductive approach. Where we're using hypoth, hypotheses. Hypothesis driven science. And I want to just give a very simple example. Let's say, that you're sitting, watching this and let's just say it's 9 o'clock at night, wherever you are sitting. And as you're watching me speak, you're yawning. You're getting very tired. Now, I want your thesis, your master's thesis, to be about why are you tired at 9 o'clock at night while you're watching Daniel Shamovitz teach what a plant knows? Now to develop your thesis, you're going to need to develop first hypotheses, and we could think of several hypotheses. Maybe the first hypothesis is that Shamovitz is a rather boring teacher. Well I'd, I'd rather think of a second hypothesis. The second hypothesis could be that you woke up too early in the morning and that's why you're tired. So now what experiments can you design to test these hypotheses? Let's go to the first one that I'm a boring lecturer. So the obvious experiment would be to do is to switch the lecturer. So you'll go back to the Coursera homepage, choose another course, and start watching it. You're still yawning. You're still tired. Now does that finding prove that I'm not boring? No, unfortunately not. because he could also be boring in the next lecture. So you do
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a third lecture. And that lecture also causes you to yawn. So, does that mean that I'm not boring? No, it could be that she was also boring. But if you do this enough times, and each time, you're still tired. You've realized that you don't have enough proof to actually support that hypothesis. So now, let's go to the second hypothesis. That you woke up too early in the morning. What would the experiment be? Again, it's pretty obvious. Let's say you don't wake up until noon the next time you watch my lecture. And now you come to the lecture of Shamowitz g/ and what a plant knows and lo and behold, you're full of energy. So what's the result of your experiment? The result is that you were tired because you're not getting enough sleep. So that's on a very simple level. And what we want to see now through plant biology, are what are the hypotheses that lead to the findings that we're going to be talking about.

1.8 PLANT EVOLUTION

And what we have here is a quote from the Nobel Prize Winner from 1937, that What drives life, is a little current kept up by sunshine'. What this is, a simple way of saying, is that without photosynthesis, there's no life on Earth. And what is photosynthesis at its basis? It's the ability of a plant to take CO2, gas Carbon Dioxide, mix it with water, and through an enzymatic reaction, the plant can yield oxygen which we need to breath and sugar, surcrose, which is the basis of everything we eat. So let's go back now though, early to evolution. Scientists will tell us that the Earth was formed about 4 and a half billions years ago. Now think about this for a second, I've told you this is a fact: the Earth was born 4 and a half billions years ago. How do they know that? What's the evidence that supports that? I'm not going to tell you the whole story of how the earth was formed. For that, I want you to go online and you can study this yourself and come up with some of the theories of how the earth was formed, and you can put that onto the forum. Let's talk about life. Once the earth was formed, how was life formed? What hypotheses or what theories have you heard about? Okay, again
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please just write it in here on the screen: how do you think life was formed? Now there are a couple different theories that I've gone around. You know, we're not going to talk about religion. Why we're not going to talk about religion? Because there's no experiment that we can do to prove it, or to disprove it. So while that might be your opinion, we're not going to deal with that here in the course. There are some other theories, for example, aliens came and conquered, and colonized the earth. Again, this is a problem that there's no real experiment that you can do. Now there are some, some theories that you might know, that there was, that life formed spontaneously through the primordial soup that was available, or that was present in the early earth. So what experiments can be done, to check this? Well, this was actually the hypothesis of Stanley Miller, who was then a young scientist in the early 50s, at the University of Califor-, at the California Institute of Technology. And his hypothesis, together with his mentor, was that, the early conditions of earth contained the chemicals and the energy necessary for life to form, or at least organic molecules, to form spontaneously. So what was the experiment they did? They took ammonia gas. They took heat. They took hydrogen, and they took water and electricity, and mixed them together, and then checked what they found in the water. And low and behold, they found organic molecules, including nucleic acids.

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Now does this experiment prove that that's how life formed? Well, what does it prove? It proves that under these conditions, organic molecules can be found but there's a big assumption. And the assumption is that this was the condition, these were the conditions early on earth's development. The problem is that with time geologists have come to the conclusion that conditions were slightly different. So what type of experiment could be formed? Well you could then change the conditions to what geologists actually think the conditions were. And what we now know is that in almost every type of experiment that people have done to repeat Miller's experiments, we do get organic molecules formed. Now, this doesn't prove that this how, how life was formed on the early Earth, but it actually does give a lot of evidence to support the hypothesis that there was, could happen spontaneously.
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So once we have these organic molecules swimming around in the oceans, they could, perhaps, self-associate to form the early cells. Now I want to ask the question, if we have early cells being formed, what type of cells were they? And there's two terms I want to talk about here. One is called heterotrophy. This is the type of life that survives by eating, by finding and absorbing food, and the other term is autotrophy, these are organisms that can make their own food, make their own energy. Heterotrophies are consumers, autotrophic organisms are producers. So what do you think were the first cells that evolved on earth, consumers or producers? What experiment can be done to differentiate between these two or what would be the evidence that would support the two? So most of you answered autotrophs. That it seems logical to you that the first organisms were those that made their own food. But actually, the first organisms on the planet were the heterotrophic bacteria, the ones that absorbed their food, they're consumers. How do we know that? We know that from the fossil record. We can find in fossils, fossils of bacteria and when we look at these fossils, these bacteria, the oldest ones that we find, resemble bacteria, modern bacteria, that are also consumers, that are heterotrophic bacteria. The first billion years of life on earth was only heterotrophic bacteria that were floating in the ocean and only about two and a half billion years ago the first photosynthetic, the first autotrophic bacteria appear at least in the fossil record. From a philosophical point of view we can understand this that heterotrophy is simpler than autotrophy, it's much easier to eat than it is to produce your own food. So the first organisms that evolved were the simple consumers, the heterotrophic bateria, and only later do we see the evolution of the more complex

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autotrophic bacteria. Let's take a closer look at this tree of evolution together with the evolution of the earth. So the heterotrophs, which evolved quite early in earth history, had the earth to themselves for the first billion years. It was only about two and a half billion years ago that we find any record of autotrophic bacteria. So these autotrophic and heterotrophic bacteria coexisted in the oceans, the autotrophs making food, the heterotrophic bacteria eating the food. And only then again, another billion years until we see what are called Eukaryotic cells. Eukaryotic cells are the type of cells that our bodies are made up of, and all animals and all plants.

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And only about the billion years ago we see here, what you can see on your screen, we find the first multicellular organisms. Now all of these organisms evolved in the oceans and that was because the land, the dry part of the earth, was uninhabitable. It was uninhabitable because of all the electricity, all the radiation coming from space.

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But here we see another huge effect of plants on the evolution of the earth because through photosynthesis this autotrophic bacteria, and this photosynthetic multisetter organisms were making oxygen. And the release of oxygen into the atmosphere led to the formation of the ozone. And once there was an ozone which trapped all the harmful radiation coming from outer space. Then the dry parts of the earth could be colonized by plants and animals and we see this happening about 500 million years ago, and one of the ways we see this happening, is through the huge reduction in amount of CO2 that's present in the atmosphere. As plants, left the oceans and colonized land, more and more photosynthesis led to a reduction in CO2 levels and an increase in the oxygen.

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But as plants left the oceans and got onto dry land, how did this effect plant evolution? What were the pressures in evolution that plants felt on the land that they didn't have in the oceans? Take a second to think about this and write it down here in the forum. What are the, the pressures, what are the, the different problems a plant would have on the land that it doesn't have in the ocean? One of the most obvious problem is a problem of water. A plant, a photosynthetic organism in the ocean doesn't have any problem of absorbing water, and having in all of its cells. But once you're on the land you have to find some way of absorbing water and transferring that water to all the other parts of the plant. An organism in the ocean can float around whereas an organism on dry land has to be rooted. It has to be, find a way of holding itself against all of the pressures of wind, of sun, of cold and it's these pressures which led to the development of plants as we know. How a plant learned, now use that as an air quote, to understand it's environment, how it can sense its environment. And while there are various forms of higher plants, ranging from the first, earlier organism all the

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Coursera

1 de octubre de 2013

[WHAT A PLANT KNOWS WEEK 1]

way up to the modern one, in this class we're only going to be dealing with higher plants, which we call angiosperms. And so in next week's lecture, we're going to being looking at angiosperms of the higher plants, and asking what does it see? How do these plants know where the light is? And is there anything special about the light that gives information to the plants? See you next week.

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