Inventing the plants of 'Avatar'

A plant physiologist from UC Riverside helped create the exotic flora seen in the movie. 'What botanist would not want to "discover" new plants and name them?' she says. The plant life on the world of Pandora is key to the plot of "Avatar." Plant expert Jodie Holt suggested scientifically credible ideas about how plants might communicate, drawing on a growing area of research called signal transduction.