Recent advances in plant biology show that plants are capable of things which in earlier days we thought impossible. Especially in the realm of plant signaling a lot of progress has been booked. Plants have an enormous plasticity and potential to record and communicate changes in environment, over short as well as long distances. As a consequence plant neurobiologists see plants as behavioral organisms with a capacity to receive, store, share, process and use information from the environment and actually change their behavior. How plants acquire information from their environment and integrate this information into responsive behavior of the individual as well as the community is the focus of this emerging field.
However how far can this vision on plants be stretched? Do they really exhibit behavior or are they only passive creatures with (complex) reflexes? Do they have some kind of neurons and molecules which play a role similar to neuroreceptors and neurotransmitters? Is it too farfetched to use the term intelligent in this context?
Prof dr. F. Baluška, Prof dr. Dieter Volkman (University of Bonn, Int. Plant Neurobiology Laboratory) and Prof dr. P. Struik (WUR) will go in discussion about the new science of Plant Neurobiology.