| Abstract | How plants and animals achieve their forms has been an enduring question in the history of biology, from early descriptions to modern genetic manipulations. Plant shapes are especially challenging, since spatial chemical patterns determine cell type, but also drive (and respond to) tissue growth, a major determinant of overall plant architecture. Increasingly, physical and mathematical scientists are becoming involved in the unique problems of mechanics, transport, and pattern formation in plants. My work uses Turing-type reaction-diffusion models to drive localized surface growth, in 3D. I have been able to generate many of the shapes seen in plants, fitting results to data from single-celled algae and more recently to conifer embryos. These shapes can be understood in terms of transitions between solutions to the reaction-diffusion equations in response to domain change. I will describe some of the computational challenges to achieving stable, accurate model solutions with large domain growth and arbitrary shape change, and some of the directions we are taking experimentally and analytically to further characterize the chemical control of plant shape. |
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