Tickling plant veins with electroshock to manipulate vascular traffic lights

Sugar-rich whole crops are used for biofuel production. To avoid harvesting, we could extract sweet sap from plant veins. However, the defense mechanisms of plants that lead the sap flow to stop, make extraction difficult. In principle, it is possible to fatigue the plant's defense responses [Pickard, et al., J. Exp. Bot., (1990)]. Hence, we propose to overstimulate the plant using continuous electroshocks. For probe positioning of the electroshock (or laser, or continuous touch) probe, we will use a home-built, cost-effective, high-resolution robot. The effect of the probes is explored on the plant Arabidopsis Thaliana. To quantify the effect on vascular transport, we use Fluorescence Recovery after Photobleaching (FRAP) measurements to visualize the sap translocation. Optimising the electroshock frequency and magnitude is considered. Finally, challenges such as scaling across species are discussed.