It’s a breakthrough from the ongoing collaboration between Syngenta and Vivent Biosignals, a Swiss-based technology enterprise. The partnership’s most recent finding was published in Nature Scientific Reports and is the latest in a series of scientific breakthroughs using these clever devices.
In simple terms, the scientists used specialized technology to ‘listen’ to crops and measure what happens when stink bugs attack soybean plants.
The technology harnesses plant electrophysiology by recording the electrical signals plant cells send out in response to changes in their environment. This is perhaps the fastest mechanism that plants use to communicate between cells, tissues, and organs.
Readings from the technology record the so-called stress levels of the plant, allowing scientists to observe the crop’s response in real time.
As Syngenta Fellow Anke Buchholz explains: ″The plant is communicating with ion fluxes and, in principle, we are listening from the outside. Using extracellular plant electrophysiology, we can hear what is going on in the plant.″
Although the use of plant electrophysiology dates back 120 years, such is the complexity and sheer weight of the data involved that only now, thanks to machine learning and AI, we can start to understand these signals.
″No human could handle and decode these signals, see the difference, and translate it,″ Anke says of the data analysis.
The Silent Crisis in Our Fields
Using breakthrough technology, scientists can now “listen” to crops in real-time and are using that ability to enhance how farmers can treat one of their biggest threats: stink bugs.
Fully grown, it’s as big as the nail on your little finger. And from above, it looks like a tiny, mottled shield has sprouted spindly legs and a wily pair of antennae. But the threat of the Neotropical brown stink bug (Euschistus heros) looms large over farmers’ fields, especially in central and south America.
These stink bugs stunt plants before they have a chance to grow and leave soybean pods shriveled in their wake. It’s just one of the threats soybean farmers face. An estimated 21 percent of soybean crops are lost each year due to pests and pathogens.
