Study
Glutamate triggers long-distance, calcium-based plant defense signaling
Toyota, Masatsugu; Spencer, Dirk; Sawai-Toyota, Satoe; Jiaqi, Wang; Zhang, Tong; Koo, Abraham J.; Howe, Gregg A.; Gilroy, Simon
Science, 2018
Arabidopsis plants engineered to express a fluorescent calcium reporter were filmed while a leaf was wounded or eaten by a caterpillar, so that calcium concentration could be watched moving through the living plant in real time. Mutants lacking glutamate receptor-like proteins were tested alongside, and glutamate was applied directly to wounds to test sufficiency.
- Studied in
- Arabidopsis thaliana
- Sample size
- imaged plants across wounding and herbivory treatments
Wounding one leaf triggers a wave of elevated calcium that travels through the vasculature to distant leaves at roughly one millimetre per second, arriving in seconds to a couple of minutes, and is followed by defence gene expression in the leaves it reaches. The wave requires glutamate receptor-like proteins, and applying glutamate to a wound is sufficient to trigger it without any wounding signal.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Glutamate leaking from damaged cells acts as the wound signal, and glutamate receptor-like channels propagate a calcium wave that carries the alarm through the plant.
How NatureHQ reads it
This is the study that lets a plant communication page answer "how does a plant tell one part of itself about another", and it is worth being precise about why the glutamate detail excites people and what it does not mean. Glutamate is also a neurotransmitter in animals, and the receptor family is related to animal glutamate receptors — so the coverage wrote itself as plants having nerves. They do not. There are no neurons, no synapses and no brain; there is a shared ancient molecular component being used for long-distance signalling in a body with no nervous system. Genuinely remarkable, and remarkable in a different way from the headline.
- One model species under laboratory conditions.
- Fluorescent reporters can perturb the calcium handling they measure.
- The wave is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the response measured; other parallel signals — electrical and hydraulic — travel at similar speeds and are hard to separate.
Watching a signal cross a plant in real time
How does one leaf tell the rest of the plant that something is eating it?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: American Association for the Advancement of SciencePublished in Science or Science Advances (AAAS).
doi.org/10.1126/science.aat7744
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-11.