Imagine a houseplant that can feel you brushing against it — and then decides whether or not to eat you. That’s essentially what the Venus flytrap does every day. Its leafy jaws make decisions based on slight touches, counting the number of times an insect jiggles its sensory hairs before committing to a kill.
Scientists have always wondered how this plant pulls off a feat that looks suspiciously like animal behavior. How does a static plant with no brain, no nerves, and no muscles manage to act like a predator?
The answer, researchers in Japan report, lies in a microscopic stretch-activated ion channel called DmMSL10. Think of it as a molecular amplifier that lets the flytrap detect “even the faintest, barely grazing contacts,” says biologist Hiraku Suda of Saitama University. Without it, the plant becomes clumsy and fails to catch its prey.
A Plant That Can “Feel”
The Venus flytrap only closes when tiny hairs on the inside are touched twice in quick succession. That’s the plant’s way of distinguishing a stray raindrop from a tasty ant.
Back in 2016, scientists discovered the plant could “count” touches. In 2020, Suda showed that calcium ions served as a kind of short-term memory. But the big question remained: what actually translates a bug’s twitch into an electrical signal strong enough to tell the plant to snap?
The answer, published this week in Nature Communications, is a microscopic ion channel called DmMSL10. It sits at the base of the flytrap’s trigger hairs and works like an amplifier.
“Our approach enabled us to visualize the moment a physical stimulus is converted into a biological signal in living plants,” said Suda in a press release.
The Amplifier in the Hairs
Here’s how it works. A gentle touch bends one of the flytrap’s trigger hairs. Inside special “indented cells” at the base of the hair, calcium levels spike and a faint electrical ripple appears. Normally, that ripple would fizzle out. But if the stimulus is strong (or repeated), the DmMSL10 channel boosts that weak signal until it crosses a threshold. At that point, the plant fires a full-blown electrical impulse, much like the action potential in animal neurons.
That impulse spreads across the leaf, accompanied by a calcium wave, telling the plant: yes, this is prey. Two of those waves in quick succession cause the trap to slam shut.
When Suda’s team engineered Venus flytraps without DmMSL10, the plants became clumsy. Ants walked across their traps, triggering only weak flickers of calcium inside the sensory hairs. In most cases, the jaws stayed open.
“Our findings show that DmMSL10 is a key mechanosensor for the highly sensitive sensory hairs that enable the detection of touch stimuli from even the faintest, barely grazing contacts,” wrote the researchers in their study.
More Than a Freak of Nature
The Venus flytrap may provide broader insights about how different plants might “feel” their environment. Plants constantly respond to mechanical forces: wind, raindrops, passing animals, or even neighboring plants. Researchers already know that other plant proteins, like PIEZO channels in roots or OSCA proteins in stress responses, help plants sense pressure. DmMSL10 now adds a new dimension to plant sensing.
The parallels to animal biology are striking. Just like neurons, flytrap hairs use a two-step system: a tiny receptor potential builds up until it hits a threshold, then an all-or-nothing signal fires. The resemblance suggests that the ability to turn touch into action may be a universal biological problem that evolution has solved in multiple ways.
And this matters beyond flytraps. Mechanosensing might help explain how trees withstand storms, how vines curl around supports, or how roots push through stubborn soil. If plants can convert microscopic nudges into electrical chatter, they may be far more aware of their physical world than we’ve given them credit for.
