Flowers “look” at the Sun through mutation “internal clock”.
At the University of California, Davis (USA) have uncovered a natural mechanism by which the sunflower always turns toward the Sun. With their insights they shared in the journal Science.
It is established that the biological clock of a sunflower have a chain of genes and proteins that control the growth of a sun flower. The turning of the sunflower to the Sun not only provides natural light, but also attracted to the warm surface of the bees.
During their research, the scientists grew a few plants, divided into those that grow under laboratory conditions with artificial light and those grown on a conventional field.
Experts have limited the plant turns with the Sun, securing some of them and carrying out continuous monitoring of the movements of flowers. For experimental samples were monitored by camera. For the qualitative observation of colors on them caused multiple labels.
It turned out that the artificial change of day length, created in the laboratory caused a loss of the ability of sunflower to focus on the light source.
This had an immediate impact on its development, biomass and growth of seeds. Detailed video analysis of the distances to the points applied in plants have shown that they have faster growing one side that causes the stem to turn around the Sun.
