Botanist Barbara Pickard had been working on electricity in plants since the 1970s, and was known to rely as much on her intuition as her data, to the chagrin of her fellow researchers. But she discovered a channel that led straight through the membrane, with its own little gate; it was there to allow the flow of electric current—essentially, calcium ions—through the cells when something mechanically pushed on them; that is, when they were physically touched. Pickard and her team found the first definitive evidence of mechanosensitive ion channels in plants. For the first time, researchers had
...more
