Leaf growth is conformal
Tissues and Organs
2016-11-23 v1 Biological Physics
Abstract
Growth pattern dynamics lie at the heart of morphogenesis. Here, we investigate the growth of plant leaves. We compute the conformal transformation that maps the contour of a leaf at a given stage onto the contour of the same leaf at a later stage. Based on the mapping we predict the local displacement field in the leaf blade and find it to agree with the experimentally measured displacement field to 92%. This approach is applicable to any two-dimensional system with locally isotropic growth, enabling the deduction of the whole growth field just from observation of the tissue contour.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1611.07032,
title = {Leaf growth is conformal},
author = {Karen Alim and Shahaf Armon and Boris I. Shraiman and Arezki Boudaoud},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.07032},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
8 pages, 4 figures