The Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Prize Lecture
Plants monitor a wide range of information from their surrounding environment. They combine information of multiple sorts, and respond in an appropriate way. In animals a large part of this job is done by the nervous system, with the brain acting as a central processor for the information collected. In plants there is no brain, and the information processing is distributed across the plant body. Much of this is achieved through the action of hormone signals that move throughout the plant and interact to integrate information and control specific responses. A good example is the number of branches a plant makes. This depends on many things – the quality of the light in which it is growing, the availability of nutrients, and the health of the existing growing tips of the shoot. All this information is channelled through a hormone signalling network and integrated to allow the plant to produce the number of branches most appropriate for its environment.

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