Nature’s Medicine Cabinet for Plants

First posted on 09-29-2008

Scientists have stumbled across a discovery they did not expect while conducting research on forest plants. Apparently, the plants respond to stress levels by producing a chemical compound that closely resembles aspirin. While plants do not worry about the economy, paying bills or who the next president will be, they do become stressed during drought conditions, insect invasions or temperature extremes. That is when they appear to turn to their internal drug cabinet.

Thomas Karl, who is a researcher at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) reported in Biogeosciences that his team had set up instruments to measure plant emissions of volatile chemical compounds in a walnut grove near Davis, California. During the collection of data, they detected a substance called methyl salicylate, which is a type of aspirin.

Karl said that scientists have known plants in laboratories to create the compound, but that the production of methyl salicylate had not been observed before in the wild.

The scientists noted that methyl salicylate emissions from plants increased significantly when plants, already stressed by a drought, went through unseasonably cool nighttime temperatures followed by dramatic daytime temperature increases.

Karl and his team said that this new information could also give credence to the theory that plants use methyl salicylate as a signal to warn other plants of dangers. Fellow NCAR scientist Alex Guenther went as far as to say that plants may have the “ability to communicate through the atmosphere.”

The findings indicate a possibility that forestry managers and agricultural specialists could someday discover early warning signs of disease and stress among crops and trees. If methyl salicylate levels could be closely monitored, disease could be diagnosed before visual signs like brown plants and dead leaves are detected.