Two University of Wisconsin researchers Edgar Spalding and Takeshi Yoshihara recently published a study concluding that there are two ways for plants to monitor the direction of gravity — a sensing machine like humans do and a mutation of the LAZY and SLQ1 genes.
Previously, the only way for plants to know which direction was up was through the cellular body settling to the bottom of certain cells, according Spalding — who is also a professor emeritus in the botany department.
“[Humans] have something in [their] inner ear that tells us our orientation,” Spalding said. “Plants have something like that. They have a little detector in them. A cellular body that settles down to the lowest side of certain cells.”…