Related papers: Vascular phyllotaxis transition and an evolutionar…
The original problem of phyllotaxis was focused on the regular arrangements of leaves on mature stems represented by common fractions such as 1/2, 1/3, 2/5, 3/8, 5/13, etc. The phyllotaxis fraction is not fixed for each plant but it may…
We propose an evolutionary mechanism of phyllotaxis, regular arrangement of leaves on a plant stem. It is shown that the phyllotactic pattern with the Fibonacci sequence has a selective advantage, for it involves the least number of…
Practical methods for quantitative analysis of radial and angular coordinates of leafy organs of vascular plants are presented and applied to published phyllotactic patterns of various real systems from young leaves on a shoot tip to…
Phyllotaxis describes the arrangement of florets, scales or leaves in composite flowers or plants (daisy, aster, sunflower, pinecone, pineapple). As a structure, it is a geometrical foam, the most homogeneous and densest covering of a large…
A model of the regular arrangement of leaves on a plant stem (phyllotactic patterns) is proposed, based on a new plant pattern algorithm. Tripartite patterning is proposed to occur by the interaction of two signaling pathways. Each pathway…
Phyllotactic patterns, i.e. regular arrangements of leaves or seeds around a plant stem, are fascinating examples of complex structures encountered in Nature. In botany, their symmetries develop when a new primordium periodically grows in…
One of humanity's earliest mathematical inquiries might have involved the geometric patterns in plants. The arrangement of leaves on a branch, seeds in a sunflower, and spines on a cactus exhibit repeated spirals, which appear with an…
Phyllotaxis, the regular arrangement of leaves or other lateral organs in plants including pineapples, sunflowers and some cacti, has attracted scientific interest for centuries. More recently there has been interest in phyllotaxis within…
What are the general principles that allow proper growth of a tissue or an organ? A growing leaf is an example of such a system: it increases its area by orders of magnitude, maintaining a proper (usually flat) shape. How can this be…
The innumerable shapes of plant leaves present a challenge to the explanatory power of biophysical theory. A model is needed that can produce these shapes with a small set of parameters. This paper presents a simple model of leaf shape…
The purpose of this paper is to present a model of a phenomenon of plant stem morphogenesis observed by Cesar Gomez-Campo in 1970. We consider a simplified model of auxin dynamics in plant stems, showing that, after creation of the original…
Gyrotactic algae are bottom heavy, motile cells whose swimming direction is determined by a balance between a buoyancy torque directing them upwards and fluid velocity gradients. Gyrotaxis has, in recent years, become a paradigmatic model…
By unifying three foundational principles of modern biology, we develop a mathematical framework to analyze the growing tree of life. Contrary to the static case, where the analogy between phylogenetic trees and the tree that grows in soil…
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…
The appearance of mathematical regularities in the disposition of leaves on a stem, scales on a pine-cone and spines on a cactus has puzzled scholars for millennia; similar so-called phyllotactic patterns are seen in self-organized growth,…
Jean's `Fundamental Theorem of Phyllotaxis' (\emph{Phyllotaxis: a systematic study in Plant Morphogenesis}, CUP 1994) describes the relationship between the count numbers of observed spirals in cylindrical lattices and the horizontal angle…
In many physical situations involving diverse length scales, waves or rays representing them travel through media characterized by spatially smooth, random, modest refactive index variations. "Primary" diffraction (by individual…
The processes of morphogenesis that give rise to the shapes of organs and organisms during development are often driven by mechanical instabilities. Can such mechanical bifurcations also drive or constrain the evolution of these processes…
Complex distribution networks are pervasive in biology. Examples include nutrient transport in the slime mold \emph{Physarum polycephalum} as well as mammalian and plant venation. Adaptive rules are believed to guide development of these…
Phylogenetic trees are simple models of evolutionary processes. They describe conditionally independent divergent evolution of taxa from common ancestors. Phylogenetic trees commonly do not have enough flexibility to adequately model all…