Geomagnetic Anomaly in the Growth Response of Peat Moss Sphagnum riparium to Temperature

" The geomagnetic field is an extremely weak but essential component of the natural environment to which plants have been exposed throughout their history. Its intensity is commonly 25–65 μT at the level of the Earth’s surface, while fluctuations in solar activity cause variations of up to 10% relative to these values [15]. A growing number of studies show that plants can sense magnetic fields and fit their processes to them [16,17,18,19]. In particular, flowering, photosynthesis, root and shoot growth, mineral nutrition, and even key events in plant evolution appear to be related to magnetic fields [16,18]. The primary source of the magnetic sense of plants has not yet been discovered. On the one hand, the participation of cryptochromes in the processes of magnetoreception has been convincingly shown [14]. The starting point for this is the formation of a radical pair, which is a natural magnetosensor, after the irradiation of a cryptochrome with blue light [20,21]. On the other hand, evidence of light-independent sensitivity of plants to a magnetic field has accumulated in recent years [22,23,24], which makes the existence of alternative magnetosensors possible." {Credits 1}

" The involvement of cryptochromes, which cross-talk with phytochrome B [12] and phototropin [13], in magnetic sensing suggests that variations in the geomagnetic field may modulate signaling of the latter. Experimental confirmation of this hypothesis has begun to accumulate in recent decades [22,23,25,26]. However, there is still no data on whether the geomagnetic field modulates the temperature signaling of these receptors, which should ultimately be reflected in the temperature-dependent responses of plants." {Credits 1}

" Temperature is considered to be one of the strongest and relatively constant factors for plant processes. However, our long-term observations of the growth of peat moss Sphagnum riparium in the natural environment showed that its effect on the growth rate depends on the geomagnetic field conditions. The strongest temperature influence was recorded at the geomagnetic Kp index from 0.87 to 1.61, and about a third of the days of the Sphagnum growing season fell within this range. Outside of this range, temperature clearly had a weaker effect on the growth rate of Sphagnum. Potentially, this phenomenon could be caused by the interaction of plant photo/thermoreceptors (phytochromes and phototropins) with cryptochrome photoreceptors, which are involved in the perception of the magnetic field in many organisms. … regardless of how Sphagnum perceives the geomagnetic field, the discovered phenomenon may have a serious ecological perspective." {Credits 1}

{Credits 1} 🎪 Mironov, V.L. Geomagnetic Anomaly in the Growth Response of Peat Moss Sphagnum riparium to Temperature. Plants 2024, 13, 48. https://doi.org/10.3390/plants13010048. © 2023 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.