Design intelligent plants

[Martin]

what kind of organs would a plant need so as to be able to communicate with us, and exercise basic logic skills, and perhaps to learn the multiplication table?

 

suppose you are in grad school studying stuff like chimeras (organisms with genetic material or cells from different species) or neural networks (like those rat braincells the lab in Florida grew in a petri dish and trained to control a flight simulator)

OK suppose you are in grad school and studying in some lab where they do stuff like that, and your research director gives you the task of creating an intelligent plant.

 

How would you do it?

 

What would your ideas be?

 

Define the logical task the plant must be able to perform (it can be very simple, like what a few rat braincells could hook themselves up and do).

 

Define how the information is going to get into and out of the plant. what its interface is going to look like-----it can be very slow. The plant can take a whole day to do one step of logic, if that makes it easier.

 

I dont know good answers to this problem. I didnt think about it yet. I would rather hear your ideas, any that there are

[LucidDreamer]

My goal: My goal is to set up a system where a plant can control the movements of an airplane. The plant will interact with a flight simulator and keep a plane flying north. Wind will constantly be applied to the airplane and it’s the plants job to adjust to changes caused by the wind and keep its flight plan.

 

To accomplish this I will use an electrochemical interface between the plant and the flight simulator. North will represent 0 degrees. The plane flying north produces an electrical potential of 50V. A deviation from 0 degrees clockwise in the amount of 1 degree will result in a change of .1V. A deviation from 0 degrees counterclockwise in the amount of 1 degree will represent a change of -.1V.

 

A dell laptop will run a simplified plane simulation written in Java or C+. The simulator program will control a USB device that will vary in an electrical signal based on the plane's flight. The USB device will be attached to an electrical device that will amplify the signal coming from the USB device, which is controlled by the flight simulator.

 

The electrical signal from the flight simulator will be attached to a Calcium gate that will allow more calcium to be released when the Voltage rises but will reduce the amount of Calcium released when the Voltage is reduced. The calcium gate will be attached to a burette that will supply a constant drip of water with a variable amount of Calcium. The burette will drip into an aquarium with growing water lilies.

 

The water lilies will respond to the amount of calcium in the water by producing a protein called Auxin. Auxin is a plant hormone that creates pH change in the cell wall near the plant membrane of between 4.5 and 7.0. Through genetic recombination the gene that codes for the protein Auxin will be amplified so that the plant DNA contains many copies. Furthermore, each of the Auxin genes will also contain animal muscle cell enhancers that will respond to the amount of calcium by increasing transcription with increasing Ca.

 

As the amount of Ca increases the amount of Auxin in the plant cells of the water lilies will increase and the PH of the plant cells will go up. Micro probes will be inserted into the plant cell walls that will measure the Ph changes. The ph changes will be measured with the appropriate device and then attached to the computer running the simulator. Since an increase in pH means that the plan is off course clockwise the increase will cause the plane to turn back counterclockwise and fix its position.

[Martin]

Help!

I just realized I don't know nearly enough to discuss the different ways a researcher might define the project and attempt to carry it out. Should have realized this before I posted the idea.

 

Lucid, this sounds reasonable enough to me and you have developed the concept to a respectable level of detail, but I have to bail out. the only hope for this thread, and further discussion, is if someone with more bio smarts decides to step in