Sentinel plants as programmable processing units: insights from a multidisciplinary perspective about stress memory and plant signaling and their relevance at community level

Abstract

ABSTRACTStress memory and an effective signaling among individuals in a given community are recognized to improve plant performance under recurrent stressful conditions. As living beings with memory and signaling abilities, plants can be considered as processing units and then be trained – or programmable from a computational viewpoint – and prepared for facing biotic and abiotic stresses. Here, we propose that sentinel plants could improve the resilience of agricultural and natural communities by reducing the impact of biotic or abiotic stressors on their neighbors. Modeling plants as programmable (or trainable) processing units compels us to think about a multidisciplinary perspective for integrating stress memory, signaling, and resilience of biological systems into executable programs, fostering the creation of applications and technologies that would benefit from the spatiotemporal dynamics related to plant-plant and plant-environment interactions.