In life, it is common for almost every kind of organism to interact with one another. In the human realm, such interactions are at the basis of joint actions, when two or more agents syntonize their actions to achieve a common goal. Shared intentionality is the theoretical construct referring to the suite of abilities that enable such coordinated and collaborative interactions. While shared intentionality has become an important concept in research on social cognition, there is controversy surrounding its evolutionary origins. An aspect still unexplored but promising to bring new insights into this open debate is the study of aneural organisms. To fill this gap, here we investigate whether climbing plants can act jointly to achieve a common goal, i.e. reaching the light. We examined Pisum Sativum plants growing intertwined when there is a need to climb but a potential support is not present in the environment. Three-dimensional kinematic analysis of their movement revealed a coordinated and complementary behaviour. They tend to coordinate their movement in time and space to achieve a joint climbing. By deliberately extending the context in which a joint action takes place, we pay tribute to the complex nature of this social phenomenon. The next challenge for the field of joint action is to generate a perspective that links coordination mechanisms to an evolutionary framework across taxa.

Pea plants (Pisum sativum L.) can perceive the presence of potential supports in the environment and flexibly adapt their behavior to clasp them. How pea plants control and perfect this behavior during growth remains unexplored. Here, we attempt to fill this gap by studying the movement of the apex and the tendrils at different leaves using three-dimensional (3D) kinematical analysis. We hypothesized that plants accumulate information and resources through the circumnutation movements of each leaf. Information generates the kinematical coordinates for the final launch towards the potential support. Results suggest that developing a functional approach to grasp movement may involve an interactive trial and error process based on continuous cross-talk across leaves. This internal communication provides evidence that plants adopt plastic responses in a way that optimally corresponds to support search scenarios.

Legumes are crops of significant global importance for ensuring food security, promoting sustainable production, and enhancing cropping efficiency within diverse agroecosystems. The pulse pea (Pisum sativum L.) is highly valued for its protein and micronutrient content, ranking third in global cultivation after soybeans and beans, with production mainly present in temperate regions. Pea production can be afflicted by crop losses due to biotic and abiotic stress factors, leading to an increased demand for improved defense systems. To cope with environmental stresses, plants have evolved several defense mechanisms, including the production of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are key in plant-to-plant communication and environmental interactions. Despite the growing interest in the characterization of plant VOCs in legumes, there has been a paucity of research on the emissions and functional roles of VOCs produced by peas, either constitutively or in response to various factors such as insects, pathogens, drought, and heat. In this review, we focused on the emission patterns and potential biological functions of VOCs produced by peas in response to various stimuli. Moreover, we discuss mass spectrometry techniques currently used or with potential applications for the study of pea VOCs. The emission of specific VOCs in response to external stimuli suggests a precise involvement in pea defense mechanisms. What emerges from this essay is that further functional studies are needed to enhance and exploit the potential of VOCs for sustainable applications, such as insect repellency, pathogen inhibition, and signaling in pea plant defense.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) play a central role in plant communication and ecology, acting as a chemical language that mediates interactions with other organisms and responses to environmental stimuli. Analyzing changes in the plant volatilome enables the effective differentiation between biotic and abiotic stresses. Consequently, monitoring VOC emissions offers valuable insights into plant signaling pathways and health status. These insights position this approach as a promising strategy for improving crop protection. Direct infusion (DI) online analytical techniques, such as proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) and adduct ionization mechanism mass spectrometry (AIM-MS), have been developed to detect and characterize VOCs in real time. Here, we evaluated the suitability of PTR-MS and AIM-MS for monitoring VOC emissions in pea plants (Pisum sativum L.). Comparative analysis revealed that AIM-MS, a recently developed technology, detected a higher number of distinct signals than PTR-MS. Annotation of detected and significant AIM-MS signals indicated a predominance toward those that were putative lipids-derived and amino acids-derived, whereas PTR-MS signals were primarily associated with putative phenolic compounds. These findings suggest that the newly developed AIM reactor offers a broader detection range and may enhance our ability to monitor plant VOC emissions. Consequently, AIM-MS emerges as a promising tool for the real-time assessment of pea plant health and stress responses. Further efforts are needed to improve the portability of DI-MS techniques and to integrate them with GC-MS techniques. Overall, these efforts will allow this technology to be exploited for plant protection in compromised environments.

Strigolactones (SLs) are signaling compounds made by plants. They play a crucial role in acting as long-distance signals from root to shoot to coordinate shoot growth with root environmental conditions. Here, we test whether and how SLs play a role in the climbing behavior of pea plants by studying the circumnutation of the tendrils using three-dimensional (3D) kinematical analysis. To assess this, we compare the typical behavior of P. sativum, a wild-type plant that produces and perceives SLs, with mutants defective in SLs synthesis or signaling, known as ramosus(rms) mutants. The results indicate that mutant plants seem unable to locate and grasp a potential support. Their movement appears to be disoriented and much less energized. We contend that this research opens new avenues for exploring SLs' role in plant behavior, a novel lens through which the role of SLs in root-to-shoot communication can be observed and analyzed.

Elucidating the evolutionary origins of social behavior remains a major challenge due to the complexity of social systems across taxa. Here, we examine social behavior through the lens of competition and cooperation across the three domains of life—Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. By focusing on gene-based mechanisms, we propose that sociality arises from conserved molecular pathways shaped by similar selective pressures, even in phylogenetically distant organisms. This cross-domain perspective highlights the potential for convergent evolutionary solutions and offers a foundation for identifying invariant principles underlying the emergence and maintenance of social behavior.