User:Frazio64/Stefano Mancuso

Stefano Mancuso (born May 9 1965) is an italian botanist, essayist, expert in plant perception. He is currently professor of arboriculture and agricultural science at University of Florence, a member of the Academy of Georgofili, a founding member of the Société internationale pour le signalement et le comportement des plantes and director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV).

Biography

Stefano Mancuso was born in Catanzaro, and, only in adulthood, he is interested in botany and plant physiology.

Since 2001 he is a professor at the University of Florence and in 2005 he founded the International Plant Neurobiology Laboratory, based in Florence and Kitakyushu (Japan), intended for studies on the plant neurobiology. In 2010 he gave a lecture at the University of Oxford on how the roots go, in the soil, in search of colonizable space, water and nutrients. In 2012, in the Plantoïd project, he took part in the creation of a bio-inspired robot (imitating some root skills), a robot that could for example explore terrain that is difficult to access or contaminated by a nuclear accident or bacteriological attack

In 2017, he published Plant Revolution, In 2014. at the University of Florence, he created a startup company specializing in the biomimetics of plants (technology that mimics certain plant capacities) and an autonomous floating greenhouse which he proposed to the Chilean government in 2016.

Scientific research

Mancuso osserva che durante l'evoluzione, le piante, sebbene prive di un cervello paragonabile a quello degli animali e sebbene non possano muoversi volontariamente, hanno sviluppato un gran numero di soluzioni ai problemi che hanno incontrato o la "capacità di risolvere i problemi" che è una definizione di intelligenza. L'uomo potrebbe essere meglio ispirato da queste soluzioni secondo lui.

Scientific influences

Stefano Mancuso drew inspiration from the studies of George Washington Carver, Ephraim Wales Bull and Charles Harrison Blackley, and from naturalists Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel.

Plant neurobiology is part of botany, which studies memory (including transgenerational memory), learning (including epigenetic learning) and experience through which plants (such as Mimosa pudica) adapt to environmental conditions.

Plant root system

Stefano Mancuso studied the ability of plants and in particular of the root system (and in particular of the root apex, very sensitive to different types of stimuli such as pressure, temperature, certain sounds, humidity and injuries) to explore and exploiting the soil environment for anchoring the plant, access to water and nutrients, symbiosis with other species and communication with other plants.

Plant perception

Over the course of evolution, plants have had to develop solutions to the major problems encountered by non-mobile organisms (part of the phytoplankton is shown to be able to move vertically and sometimes horizontally). Although they have neither nerves nor brain, plants have a social life and therefore a certain sensitivity (the clues of which can be found in some cell (gametes and bacteria), in corals or sponges and in apparently very primitive organisms such as trichoplax. Which have nothing that resembles a brain, but which exhibit behaviors that evoke a neuronal function), even if these attributes are very different from those observed in the animal world. Mancuso and his colleagues Gagliano and Robert thus show, in 2012, that plants have mechanoreceptors that for example make their roots sensitive to sound and its direction of propagation. Other biologists, 4 years earlier, had claimed that trees stressed by the severe lack of water can emit sounds that are perhaps more than just passive signs of cavitation.

Plant Intelligence

Mancuso notes that the Intelligence has long been considered "what distinguishes us from other living beings", but if problem solving is a good definition of intelligence, then we must recognize that plants have developed an intelligence that allows them to develop and respond to most of the problems they face in their life.

Thus the plants adapted to almost all terrestrial and marine enlightened environments and, in the face of herbivores and predatory insects, they developed numerous adaptations. They don't have an organ comparable to a brain, but they seem to have the equivalent of a "diffuse brain". Some are, for example, capable of emitting substances that accurately attract predators of insects that attack them and all have a large arsenal of physico-chemical responses. The answers are sometimes sophisticated (for example, some plants make their cannibal predators by transmitting substances that change their behaviour).

Bibliography

Paper

• Baluška, F., Volkmann, D., Hlavacka, A., Mancuso, S., & Barlow, P. W. (2006). Neurobiological view of plants and their body plan. In Communication in plants (pp. 19–35). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
• Brenner, E. D., Stahlberg, R., Mancuso, S., Vivanco, J., Baluška, F., & Van Volkenburgh, E. (2006). Plant neurobiology: an integrated view of plant signaling. Trends in plant science, 11(8), 413-419.
• Gagliano, M., Mancuso, S., & Robert, D. (2012). Towards understanding plant bioacoustics. Trends in plant science, 17(6), 323-325.
• Gagliano M, Renton M, Duvdevani N, Timmins M & Mancuso S (2012) Out of sight but not out of mind: alternative means of communication in plants. PLoS One, 7(5), e37382.
• Mancuso, S. (Ed.). (2011). Measuring roots: an updated approach. Springer Science & Business Media.
• Mancuso, S., & Viola, A. (2015). Brilliant green: The surprising history and science of plant intelligence. Island Press.
• Santelia, D., Vincenzetti, V., Azzarello, E., Bovet, L., Fukao, Y., Düchtig, P., ... & Geisler, M. (2005). MDR‐like ABC transporter AtPGP4 is involved in auxin‐mediated lateral root and root hair development. FEBS letters, 579(24), 5399-5406.
• Schapire, A. L., Voigt, B., Jasik, J., Rosado, A., Lopez-Cobollo, R., Menzel, D., ... & Botella, M. A. (2008) Arabidopsis synaptotagmin 1 is required for the maintenance of plasma membrane integrity and cell viability. The Plant Cell, 20(12), 3374-3388.

Essay

• La nazione delle piante, Laterza, 2019
• L'incredibile viaggio delle piante, Laterza, 2018
• Plant revoluction, Giunti editore, 2017
• Botanica. Viaggio nell'universo vegetale, Aboca edizioni, 2017
• Verde brillante, sensibilità e intelligenza del mondo vegetale, con Alessandra Viola, Giunti editore, 2015
• Biodiversi, con Carlo Petrini, Slow Foof, 2015
• Uomini che amano le piante, Giunti editore, 2014

References

• https://www.ted.com/speakers/stefano_mancuso

[[Category:Italian Botanist]] [[Category:University of Florence]]