Anesthesia Works on Plants Too, and We Don’t Know Why

Humans have been using anesthesia for almost 175 years, but we’re still not sure how it works. Researchers have come at the problem from dozens of directions and posited many hypotheses, but no one has yet explained the mechanism. Enter the botanists. Who else would think of sealing a Venus flytrap in a glass case, gassing it with ether, then tickling it a bit?

A group of researchers decided to dive into the thorny problem of anesthesia by looking at how it affects a thorny plant, Venus flytraps (dioneae muscipula). These small herbs (yep, technically they’re an herb, like banana trees), are good candidates for this research because they have predictable movements that are easy to analyze. The researchers hit them with lidocaine and ether, then observed their responses. They were attempting to find if they react similarly to humans hit with these chemicals. What they found was both remarkable and inexplicable.

These are the structure of anesthetics the researchers tested on the plants. As you can see, they’re massively different, but produce similar effects in both plants and animals.

Plants and animals are separated by 1.5 billion years of evolution, but still have many similarities. Cell structures are broadly the same, though plants add chloroplasts and cell walls to the mix. Animals evolved muscles and discrete internal organs for processing nutrients from the environment, while plant cells are more homogenous. A plant cell from one part of the organism is more similar to one from another part than…