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Plants find light using gaps between their cells
A mutant seedling revealed how plant tissues scatter incoming light, allowing plants to sense its direction and move toward it.
Since ancient times, plants’ ability to orient their eyeless bodies toward the nearest, brightest source of light — known today as phototropism — has fascinated scholars and generated countless scientific and philosophical debates. It wasn’t until 1658 that the alchemist and natural philosopher Thomas Browne established phototropism as a fact by documenting that mustard seedlings growing in pots in a basement persistently oriented their growth toward an open window. Five different families of photoreceptors, plus hormones and signal pathways, work together to dictate down to the cellular level the direction in which a plant builds new tissue — explaining how stems twist, turn and shoot upward as needed.
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