The Venus Flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is a meat eating plant that catches and digests animal preymostly insects and arachnids. Its trapping structure is created by the terminal portion of each one of the plant’s leaves and fires by little hairs on their inner surfaces. When an insect or spider crawling along the leaves contacts a hair, the trap closes if a different hair is approached inside 20 seconds of the first strike. The requirement of redundant causing in this mechanism functions as a guarantee against a waste of energy in trapping objects with no nutritive value.

The plant’s common name appertains to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, while the genus name alludes to Dione. Dionaea is a monotypic genus strongly related to the waterwheel plant and sundews.

If the prey isn’t able to escape, it may continue to excite the inner surface of the lobes, and this will cause another expansion reply that forces the edges of the lobes together, finally sealing the trap hermetically and forming a ‘stomach ‘ in which digestion happens. Digestion is catalysed by enzymes pumped out by glands in the lobes.

Oxidative protein alteration is certain to be a predigestive mechanism of the Dionaea muscipula. Aqueous leaf extracts have been discovered to contain quinones eg the naphthoquinone plumbagin that couples to different NADH-dependent diaphorases to supply superoxide and hydrogen peroxide on autoxidation. Such oxidative alteration could rupture animal cell surfaces. Plumbagin is understood to prompt apoptosis, connected with the regulation of Bcl-2 family of proteins. When the Dionaea extracts were preincubated with diaphorases and NADH in the vicinity of serum albumin ( SA ), successive tryptic digestion of SA was facilitated. Since the secretory glands of Droseraceae contain proteases and most likely other degradative enzymes, it could be the presence of oxygen-activating redox cofactors function as extracellular predigestive oxidants to render membrane-bound proteins of the prey ( insects ) more at the mercy of proteolytic attacks.

Digestion takes about 10 days, after that the prey is reduced to a husk of chitin. The trap then reopens, and is prepared for reuse.