The cabbage in your fridge still runs on a daily clock.
Kids say the darndest things. Janet Braam from Rice University was talking to her teenage son about her research on plant clocks. She had found that Arabidopsis, a commonly studied laboratory plant, produced more defensive chemicals at times of the day when insect pests were most likely to attack them. She told him that the levels of these chemicals probably rise and fall over the day, driven by an internal clock like the ones that dictate our own daily rhythms.
He said, “Well, I know what time of day I’m going to eat my vegetables!” . . .
The vegetables in your fridge are still very much alive, even though they’ve been separated from their parent plants. They still take in oxygen, send out carbon dioxide, lose water, and metabolise nutrients (which is why they continue to ripen). Even so, Braam was surprised at how easy it was to reset their daily rhythms. “It means that post-harvest vegetables were more “alive” than we might have imagined,” she says.
Simple cycles of light and shade were enough to control the levels of substances called glucosinolates in cabbages, even when they were sitting in the fridge. These naturally produced chemicals protect the vegetables from pests and might be good for our health, which suggests that the way we store our produce could affect its shelf life and nutritional value.
Braam’s graduate student Danielle Goodspeed demonstrated this by cutting small discs from the leaves of freshly bought cabbages and exposing them to cycles of 12 hours in light and 12 hours in darkness. (This is a common way of adjusting body clocks. Just think about what happens when you cross time zones—you get jetlag because it’s bright when you expect it to be dark, but your body soon adjusts to the new light schedule.)
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/06/20/the-cabbage-in-your-fridge-still-runs-on-a-daily-clock/
= new reply since forum marked as read
but they're baby carrots, and they're in a plastic container, so not very loud.
