Suberin... WTF?
NewSkool
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Nov 02 |10:24
Last Updated on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:33
Suberin, I'm pretty sure is the word on everybody's mind right now. Gotta be pretty dumb to have never heard of suberin before, right? Well here at The Skunkhouse Magazine we're opening the lid on suberin and showing you exactly what suberin is and what the fuck it has to do with our plants.
Suberin is a complex fat produced outside and inside plant cells to regulate the intake of water and nutrients. It is presently believed by a lot of good marijuana growers that the nutrient uptake process only happens in 3 different ways... transpiration, where the light pulls water and nutrients up through the plant; osmosis, the force of the water from the medium pushes itself into the semi permeable membrane; finally, the roots simply bump into the nutrients as they grow. While all three of these are true, this implies that the nutrient and water uptake process is purely passive, meaning the plant has no choice in the matter. Osmotic pressure forces it in, they say... transpiration pulls everything up through the plant... and even when the poor roots bump into nutrients and water they've got no choice but to let them both in. Wrong.
Land plants have evolved lipophilic (easily broken down by certain compounds) barriers that protect the internal
living tissues from dehydration, injuries, and pathogens, and have evolved regulatory networks to adjust the barriers to the changing physiological and environmental conditions of the plant. Plant primary organs, such as young stems and leaves, are protected by the cuticle, a lipophilic extracellular polymer membrane composed of cutin and waxes. You've probably seen this skin type substance yourself on young seedlings after removing the seed casing too early, often the cotyledons will be held together by a skin type substance. Secondary (mature) stems and roots, tubers, and healing tissues are protected by cork, a tissue with multiple layers of cells that are dead at maturity. Key compounds for cork impermeability are suberin, a complex polymer comprising both aliphatic (intoxicating) and aromatic domains, and associated waxes. Cork is part of the plant constitutive defence system and contains secondary compounds such as triterpenoids and soluble phenylpropanoids that act on herbivores, microbes, and fungi.
In the root zone suberin works by preventing both the uptake of water and nutrients depending on certain environmental and physiological factors. So it doesn't matter what ratios of nutrients or in what concentrations they are in so long as pH is in range and there are enough nutrients hitting the root surface to support optimum growth then the plant will grow fine. Indeed it is my own surmission, at this present time, that by feeding a higher concentration of nutrients than is needed by the plant we can cut down the plant's need for transpiration. So the plant drinks less but uses more nutrients.
All over the web you will be told that you can over fertilise your plants, you will even be shown symptoms of over fertilisation in pictures on websites such as Greenman's Page or even in books by Jorge Cervantes. The images they are showing you is from under nutrition, which can be caused by a lot of different things, from bad pH to root rot. You might also be told by certain growers that they can tell which nutrients the plant has too much of... they are all wrong. So the next time a grower looks at your plants and tells you that you've over fertilised you can tell them they're wrong and point them to this article. If you have any questions related to this article then please feel free to use the comments boxes below.
To prove just how good suberin is we did an experiment and you can read the full account here:
The Suberin Experiment
http://www.theskunkhouse.com/index.php/all-about-cannabis/science-a-theory/100-suberin-wtf
