nicotine project

[The_simpsons]

So im doing a project work in my school. The point of it is to compare the amounts of nicotine produced in Nicotiana Sylvestris plants, depending on different environments, developmental stages and also tissue damage/non tissue damage.

 

A question i have is, when it comes to using a sample of the plant to measure the nicotine, which part do i "nip" without the plant signaling it as tissue damage?

It is known that these plants produce more nicotine with bug bites, so i don't want to mimic it when taking samples and it screws up the results.

 

And also, i just started seeding them, and i gonna get lamps. Since i live in Sweden, and it's cold, minus degrees and snow this time of the year, im going to need to replace the sun with lampas. But im not sure how strong lamps im going to need. Anybode have an idea of luminosity required?

[John Cuthber]

I don't know if you can sample the plant without affecting it. The solution is to use lots of plants and only sample each one once- then it doesn't matter what effect the sampling has. The problem is that you might need a lot of plants.

Also You need to check on wherther or not the plants communicate (No, I have not gone mad) some plants give off "alarm pheromones" when atacked by insects. If tobacco does that then you need to grow each plant in a separate atmosphere.

 

Provided that you don't mind ignoring some of the questions about growing particular plants- most notably cannabis, you can find lots of data on the web about growing plants under atrtificial light. Search for lamps and hydroponics.

[Paralith]

There are some plants that actually do not respond to purely mechanical damage, and will only begin a defensive response if the damage is accompanied by a chemical found in animal saliva. This is an adaptation to prevent the waste of expensive defense compounds every time a leaf accidentally gets ripped. You should do some research and see if this is the case for your plants. If it is, you won't get any reaction at all by just cutting the leaves.

 

I actually did a research project on "talking plants," and unfortunately there's not a lot of truly substantiated evidence for it. Most experiments involve unrealistic environments and/or amounts of the proposed "alarm" compound, so their relevance to real life situations is dubious. However, there is one well studied system of sagebrush (Artemisia tridentate) and wild tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata), where tobacco plants growing next to clipped sagebrushes displayed a significant decrease in herbivore damage compared to tobacco plants growing next to unclipped sagebrushes, presumably because the "alarm" compound given off by the sagebrush incited the tobacco to keep its defensive systems primed. However, they have yet to discern exactly what compound is serving as the "alarm" compound, and as far as I know, no other such system has been found.

 

And I say "alarm," because the plant being chewed on isn't actually trying to alert its neighbors. It's not adaptive to give your competitors a helping hand. It's more appropriate to say that the "listening" plant is eavesdropping on its neighbors, and responding to the defensive compounds that its neighbors release when preyed upon.