Disappointing
Because I found Aspects of Plant Intelligence so interesting and strange (as I wrote about 2 weeks ago), I've been looking up some of the references from it. So far I've found two errors: one probably a typo, one quite significant.
The minor error is that one of the references (ironically, to a paper by the same author) had the wrong date. Minor, but had the author had a more common name I might not have been able to find the paper.
The important error is that one of the cited papers—Volatiles from Different Barley Cultivars Affect Aphid Acceptance of Neighbouring Plants—doesn't say what Trewavas claims it does. I was particularly eager to read this article, because it was purported to be about inter-plant communication—specifically warnings of aphid attack—which is not something I was aware of plants doing. It turns out to have been nothing of the sort: it's about indirect effects on one barley variant of being near another; regardless of any particular stimulus triggering a signal. In fact, none of the 'signalling' plants in the study were under aphid attack.
Most disappointingly of all, this was obvious from reading the abstract, so Trewavas must have either meant to reference a different paper, or not bothered even looking at the abstract, or been outright dishonest. This makes me suspicious of other claims in the citing article, but I neither have the time nor the journal subscriptions to check out every claim, so I'll probably just have to assume this isn't a reliable source.
Comments
Interesting post! Too bad the plants communication thing did not seem to pan out. That would have been nice to see!
About the lack of journal subscriptions, have you checked the KSL online databases, either for the specific journal or using Academic Search Premier? I find that I can download a huge variety of journal articles, just because I work at Case, and the fact that KSL has subscriptions.
Bill Claspy (wpc) in the library is a big help in helping you find out what is available online.
In general—and especially because a lot of the non-book sources I need are quite recent—I've found Ohiolink to be a fantastic resource. The only journal I commonly need that I can't find through that (Artificial Life) I have personal access to because I joined the society that publishes it.
The problem is that this paper, being about plants, cites a lot of fairly obscure agricultural/agronomic journals, and papers from a wider range of dates than I usually find I need. Some of the journals just aren't stocked, and others don't have electronic versions that go back enough years.
I'm sure I could find at least some of them in hard copy, but I'm fighting the temptation to devote a lot of resources to this, because it's really a tangent from my research.
I also recommend the Electronic Journal List. It does list some access for Artificial Life (1997 to present with an embargo for 1 year).
oops - that's actually what I mean when I refer to "Ohiolink". Because my reading needs are so heavily skewed to journals and not books, I forget that the Electronic Journal Center is only one part of the service.
I wonder why I had convinced myself that Artificial Life wasn't stocked... perhaps I over-generalised after trying to get an article that was within the embargo period. No matter - the ISAL membership has already paid for itself in conference fee discounts.
What intrigues me about this paper is that Trewavas cited the aphid paper, which doesn't really support his claim, when there were, at that time, more articles on plant-plant defensive interactions involving the release of ethylene and/or methyl jasmonate by the attacked plant, like the very early (and very rough) work by EE Farmer and CA Ryan (PNAS, 1990 Oct: 87(19), 7713-6). To give Trewavas a break, however, most of the significant plant-plant defense-signaling work has been done since 2003, and there was a relatively recent review in Science on it... I think it's by CA Preston. Granted, I got the impression form the article that Trewavas had larger fish to fry than the topic of interplant defense signaling, but I understand that his mis-citation erodes much of his credibility. Sad.
Thank you muchly for those references! With an author name, journal title and rough idea of date I was able to find the review article: Volatile Signaling in Plant-Plant Interactions: "Talking Trees" in the Genomics Era, and it's going towards the top of my reading list because I do find this idea very interesting.
I think you're right that this was only a small point, incidental to Trewavas's main argument. If there was some earlier work that would support the plant-plant signalling claim, then I'm a lot more inclined to assume this was a clerical error—a simple matter of mis-remembering which paper he read XYZ in—than anything more worrying.
I'm glad you found what you wanted :). I know that somewhere (that great abyss of somewhere), I have a few papers on it, left over from a Plant-Insect Interactions course I took a few years back. The idea of plant communication is equally as interesting to me as the concept of "plant memory," which I have a few papers on (also "somewhere"). As I clean through my piles of stuff this summer, I'll pass on references that look like they would interest you.