The word “resilience” has recently become very common: the image we have of this idea is a resource we can use to face this hard time the pandemic is exposing us to.
However, we do not master resilience, quite the opposite: we can say the plant world is the best mentor we could have on the subject.
Plants have always been capable to adjust to the most extreme conditions. Unable to make quick movements to get away from dangers, they work on survival strategies in advance. They have such a high level of adaptation that in case of emergency, they are ready to sacrifice a part of themselves to survive and grow again.
It is a slow and careful process, but with great preparation, as the director of the Micro-BioRobotics Center of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Pontedera Barbara Mazzolai explains in her essay “The Ingenious nature, how and why plants will change (and save) the planet”, finalist of the Galileo Awards 2021 for scientific divulgation.
Taking inspiration from this strategic and preventive skill in the plant world, it is clear that also for humans being resilient implies the need to be prepared for adverse situations, to accept them and to know how to evolve. Exactly as Nature does.
The examples of resilience that Nature offers us are always before our eyes. Let’s think of some of the most impressive ones: the ancient Gingko biloba that has survived millions of years, or the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Chernobyl, which did not prevent nature from surprising us by quickly sprouting again.
Season after season, change after change, plants remember the changes they have experienced and through a reshaping of the coding in their genetic heritage they adapt to the new environment, the new world.
Plants are not affected by age, they are able to reproduce continuously, with the same energy and power in the young plant as in the centenarian one. They are able to respond quickly to stimuli by remodeling the synthesis pathways of specific metabolites according to different environmental conditions.
This is possible thanks to the totipotence of the meristematic tissues that every plant keeps active in its roots and buds, ensuring that every spring a new life begins again enriched with all the experience of millennia of events.
The plant world is for us at AetheraBiotech a great and fascinating source of inspiration, where we built our innovation on.
It is the use of plant cells totipotency that made the in vitro cultivation possible thanks to the CROP® technological platform we implemented. It allows us to obtain the ideal Phyto-complex because it is high titrated, safe, sustainable, highly standardized and always available, ready to give added value to cosmetic and nutraceutical products.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change. Charles Darwin.
