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Functional Plant Biology Functional Plant Biology Society
Plant function and evolutionary biology
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Cyclic voltammetry of volatile memristors in the Venus flytrap: short-term memory

Alexander G. Volkov https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6292-612X A C and Leon Chua B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Department of Chemistry, Oakwood University, Huntsville, AL 35896, USA.

B Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.

C Corresponding author. Email: agvolkov@yahoo.com

Functional Plant Biology 48(6) 567-572 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP20379
Submitted: 4 December 2020  Accepted: 15 December 2020   Published: 11 January 2021

Abstract

Plants have sensory, short-term and long-term memory. Possible candidates for memory in plants are memristors; resistors with memory. Memristors have been found in seeds, plants, flowers and fruits. The electrostimulation of plants by bipolar periodic waves can induce electrical responses with fingerprints of volatile or non-volatile memristors. Here, we show that the electrostimulation of the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula Ellis) by unipolar sinusoidal or triangular periodic electrical trains induces electrical responses in plants with fingerprints of volatile memristors. The discovery of volatile generic memristors in plants opens new directions in the modelling and understanding of electrical phenomena in the plant kingdom.

Keywords: Dionaea muscipula Ellis, ion channels, memristor, signal transduction, Venus flytrap, volatile memory.


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