babuska

František Baluška was Group Leader at the IZMB, University of Bonn. He is one of the leading scientists in the fields of cell biology, cytoskeleton, polarity and plant sensory biology. He published more than 200 peer reviewed papers. Web of Science scores 288 entries with H-Index 66. In order to foster this new sensory and behavioural view of plants and their roots, he has cofounded two scientific journals: Plant Signaling & Behavior and Communicative and Integrative Biology. He is editor of the book series ‘Signaling and Communication in Plants’ at the Springer Verlag.

Plant Cognition is Based on Cellular Sentience
Because all life is based on cells, any evolutionary theory of the emergence of sentience and cognition must be grounded in mechanisms that take place in prokaryotes, the most ancient unicellular species. Cells emerged at the very beginning of life on Earth and are coterminous with life. Life on the Earth has evolved for an estimated 4 billion of years. For the first 2 billion of years of that evolutionary span, all life was unicellular, including at first archaea, bacteria and then eukaryotic protists. Unicellular organisms, such as diverse protists and algae, still live an unicellular life until present times. Plants evolved from algae and vascular plants are integrated into coherent bodies via plant-specific synaptic adhesion domains, action potentials (APs) and other means of long-distance signalling running throughout the plant bodies. Plant-specific synapses and APs are proposed to allow plants to generate their self identities having unique ways of sensing and acting as agents with their own goals. Plants move their organs with a purpose and with obvious awareness of their surroundings and require APs to perform and control these movements. Plants use plant-specific sensory systems and neurotransmitter-based cell-cell communication to manage stress adaptation via plant-specific cognition and behavior.