Thiago Francisco de Carvalho Oliveira

Federal University of Pelotas | UFPEL · Department of Botany

Do living beings need brains to do extraordinary things? The human brain manages many tasks at the same time, from keeping the body working to thinking and dreaming, thanks to the electrical signals it produces. But what about organisms that survive pretty well without brains, like plants? You might be surprised to learn that plants can produce ele...

Plant electrophysiology has emerged as an important field within plant physiology, offering a means to detect responses to various stresses before the manifestation of classic symptoms. Among these stresses, insect predation stands out for its ability to damage plant tissues and cells, triggering defense mechanisms such as the induction of systemic...

We commence our discussion by asserting that Plant Physiology is fundamentally focused on comprehending the evolutionary and adaptive processes of plants over time. Despite its intuitive association with the temporal dimension, the field has traditionally been underpinned by methods that largely overlook the temporal element. Even in this era of ad...

Selective attention is an important cognitive phenomenon that allows organisms to flexibly engage with certain environmental cues or activities while ignoring others, permitting optimal behaviour. It has been proposed that selective attention can be present in many different animal species and, more recently, in plants. The phenomenon of attention...

Fruits, like other parts of the plant, appear to have a rich electrical activity that may contain information. Here, we present data showing differences in the electrome complexity of tomato fruits through ripening and discuss possible physiological processes involved. The complexity of the signals, measured through approximate entropy, varied alon...

To survive in a dynamic environment growing fixed to the ground, plants have developed mechanisms for monitoring and perceiving the environment. When a stimulus is perceived, a series of signals are induced and can propagate away from the stimulated site. Three distinct types of systemic signaling exist, i.e., (i) electrical, (ii) hydraulic, and (i...

Attention is the important ability of flexibly controlling limited cognitive resources. It ensures that organisms engage with the activities and stimuli that are relevant to their survival. Despite the cognitive capabilities of plants and their complex behavioural repertoire, the study of attention in plants has been largely neglected. In this arti...

Plants are sessile organisms that evolved several mechanisms to cope with the adversities imposed by the environment. One of the strategies to deal with environmental stressors is the production of compounds known as specialized/secondary metabolites. These compounds are known for not being present in all plants and not being directly involved in t...

The physiological processes underlying fruit ripening can lead to different electrical signatures at each ripening stage, making it possible to classify tomato fruit through the analysis of electrical signals. Here, the electrical activity of tomato fruit (Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiforme) during ripening was investigated as tissue voltage var...

There are many studies showing the influence of the magnetic field (MF) on the antioxidant system (AS) in plants, but little is known about the mechanisms behind it. Among some possibilities, calcium transmembrane dynamics is a likely candidate in mediating responses of ROS to MF. Thus, the use of calcium channel inhibitor lanthanum (La3+) could br...

The electrical activity of tomato plants subjected to fruit herbivory was investigated. The study aimed to test the hypothesis that tomato fruits transmit long-distance electrical signals to the shoot when subjected to herbivory. For such, time series classification by machine learning techniques and analyses related to the oxidative response were...

In our study, we investigated some physiological and ecological aspects of the life of Cuscuta racemosa Mart. (Convolvulaceae) plants with the hypothesis that they recognise different hosts at a distance from them, and they change their survival strategy depending on what they detect. We also hypothesised that, as an attempt of prolonging their sur...