Do Plants feel pain?

Do plants have feelings?

Well, we would never know what they feel.

But we can definitely investigate how they respond to wounds.

If you damage the leaf, for instance, a signal, typically a jasmonate, tell the other leaves about it.

This can be detected even as electrical signals from the leaves that respond.

And what is more interesting is that the receptors for these signals

are very much like the receptors of glutamate neurotransmitter in our own brains.

A study of this phenomenon is reported in a recent paper in the journal Nature.

Nature 500, 422–426 (22 August 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12478