How do plants attract wasps to come kill caterpillars which eat their leaves?

Most of us think of plants as static organisms, yet they change the atmosphere, change the soil, and have fascinating relationships with insects and bacteria, and are often times directly communicating with other organisms and each other!

The class begins with an attempt to understand how organisms, such as bacteria and fungi sense each other. How do bacteria “know” how many of them there are in a certain area? An understanding of cell wall structure, quorum sensing, biofilm formation will be developed as a prerequisite (self to self) to the more sophisticated relationships (self to non-self), such as the mutualism and pathogenesis (disease) bacteria and plants engage in.

Besides nitrogen, phosphorus is a limiting factor for plant growth, in fact, experts predict that the  total world phosphorus ores will be extracted by 2050! Thus, an understanding of the mycorrhizal fungi (pictured above) and its interaction with plants is vital.

With the fundamentals from the first weeks of class in place, and a little chemistry, we can begin to unravel the mysteries of nitrogen fixation, phosphorus acquisition, and other fascinating examples of plant communication.