Plants may do math to regulate their food consumption

BBC : During the day, plants use photosynthesis to build up their starch reserves; then at night, when there is no sunlight, they live off those reserves. To find out how plants regulate their starch consumption to adjust for changing lengths of darkness and amounts of starch stored, Martin Howard of the John Innes Centre in the UK and colleagues studied the plant Arabidopsis, a model organism frequently used for studying plant biology. The researchers determined that information about the size of a plant’s starch store and the time until dawn is encoded in two kinds of molecules—S for starch, and T for time. Thanks to a biochemical mechanism that, in effect, divides S by T, the plants are able to optimize their use of carbohydrates and maintain metabolism and growth throughout the night. Birds may use a similar method to monitor their fat levels during migration.