Plant agency: from senome and electrome to plant semiosphere
Frontiers in Plant Physiology May 20, 2026 Luís Felipe Basso, Frantisek Baluška, Gustavo Maia Souza
Plants are increasingly understood as complex agents rather than passive organisms. This theoretical synthesis integrates Cellular Cognitive Biology, Biosemiotics, and Phenomenology to describe how plant agency arises from autopoietic organization and enactive sense-making. At the cellular level, the senome—a multimodal analog interface—and the electrome allow real-time environmental evaluation. Bioelectric and mechanical perturbations cross a semiotic threshold, becoming meaningful signs through semantic couplings. Plant agency scales from individual cells to the whole organism as a decentralized modular system, projecting sentience into surroundings via extended cognition, driving niche construction and a plant semiosphere. The N-space episenome enables holobiont emergence, linking individual senomes into a distributed hypersenome for shared decision-making and collective survival. This shared agency demands a reconciliation between ontology and ethics, grounding a new environmental ethics and legal recognition of nature.