Overview
- IIT Mandi scientists used live‑cell microscopy on tomato and brinjal plants and observed a fixed, stepwise shutdown of organelles under anaesthesia followed by recovery in the reverse order.
- The team reported that mitochondria lost function first and the nucleus shut down last, and that recovery appeared to be coordinated from the nucleus outward.
- Thousands of nuclei showed near‑simultaneous chromatin rearrangement with euchromatin moving to the nuclear periphery, a pattern the researchers say may serve as a biomarker of anaesthesia.
- The findings were published in Advanced Biology (2025) and Chemical & Biomedical Imaging (2026) and were reported widely on Monday, June 29, 2026, by multiple outlets.
- The authors caution the results do not prove plants have human‑like subjective experience and plan cross‑species tests, next targeting the roundworm C. elegans to see if the signature is conserved.