The paper “Biological efficiency in processing information in green plants“, co-authored by Dorje Brody and Anthony J. Trewavas (University of Edinburgh), has been published today (16 August) in the Proceedings A of the Royal Society of London. It is published open access (link here). Green plants form the basis of almost all food chains on earth, but conditions for their growth are changing too rapidly for them to adapt to harsher, often drier and warmer environments. Understanding efficiencies and capabilities of plants is acutely important, and this demands the development of a novel mathematical framework
that enables us to infer conditions under which plants can adapt to the changing environments. This leads to the question of how efficiently plants manage to process environmental information so as to adapt and hence enhance survival probability.The objective of this paper is to clarify the notion of efficiency, and the implications of being efficient, by developing a framework that allows to model dynamical behaviours of plants as a result of processing information. The paper finds that such dynamical models have precise analogies in the modelling of open quantum systems, and that conversely, new physical intuitions can be gained about open quantum systems — such as the meaning of decoherence — by applying mathematical techniques of quantum theory in modelling the dynamics of biological systems. The image below shows Figure 1 from the paper.