Scientists have created a soft robot to prove that plant roots "dance"

Scientists became interested in what happens to plant roots when they go deeper into the soil. Taking the whole process,

they processed the data.By condensing 100 hours of growth footage into a minute, scientists saw that rice roots use a special trick to anchor themselves in the soil. Most of all it looked like the movement of a corkscrew. To test their theory, the scientists used a soft robot that itself resembles a root.

Thanks to observations, scientists have received a newunderstanding how and why plant root tips rotate during growth. For example, it turned out that some roots cannot move like a corkscrew. The culprit is a mutation in the HK1 gene, which causes them to grow straight down, and not twirl and twist, like other roots do.

New time-lapse videos capture whatwhich is too slow for our eyes: the growing tips of the rice roots make a corkscrew-like movement, swaying and wriggling in a spiral, burrowing into the soil. By using time-lapse photography along with a root-like robot, the researchers gained new insights into how and why the tips of plant roots rotate during growth. Credit: Benfey / Goldman Lab.

Scientists suggest that the spiral growth strategy, the special "dance" of plants, is a search strategy - a way to find the best way to dig deeper into the soil.

In experiments carried out in the laboratoryPhysics professor Daniel Goldman at the Georgia Institute of Technology, observations of normal and mutant rice roots have shown that normal spiral roots are three times more likely to find a hole and grow on the other side.

Georgia Tech andThe University of California, Santa Barbara built a soft, pliable robot that spins around like a root and left it on an obstacle course made up of unevenly spaced pegs.

Even without complex sensors or elementsThe robotic root was still able to overcome obstacles and find its way through the pegs. But when the bending from side to side stopped, the robot quickly got stuck.

Finally, the team raised both normal and mutantrice seeds in a soil mix used for baseball fields to test them for obstacles that the root can actually hit in the soil. Of course, while the mutated roots had problems with obstacles, the normal ones overcame them easily.

The work helps scientists understand how roots grow in hard, compacted soil.

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