Plants move to get away from their decaying brethren

Scientific American · Joanna Thompson · 2026-10-17 11:00 UTC

A new discovery reveals how plants protect themselves from microbes in rotting material

Plants seem stationary: they don’t skip, fly or walk around. But that doesn’t mean they don’t move. The organisms bend their roots and shoots in response to stimuli such as water, light, salt and gravity. These responsive movements, called tropisms, are crucial for plants’ survival.

Now researchers have discovered a new way plants move, which they call “saprotropism”: the bending of roots to avoid dead or rotting plant tissue. The results were published in Science.

The discovery began with a failed experiment and an unexpected observation. Yuzhou Zhang, a biologist at Northwest A&F University in China, was studying how plants move in response to gravity in a laboratory in Austria when one of his agar plates became contaminated with airborne microbes. Just before he threw it away, he noticed something striking: almost every single one of the plants’ roots in the plate was bent away from the spoilage. The consistency “immediately made me wonder whether this was more than a random response,” Zhang says.

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