Related papers: Geometric interpretation of phyllotaxis transition
Leaves of vascular plants are arranged regularly around stems, a phenomenon known as phyllotaxis. A constant angle between two successive leaves is called divergence angle. On the one side, the divergence angle $\alpha_0$ of an initial…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A progress report on two recent theoretical approaches proposed to understand the physics of irreversible fractal aggregates showing up a structural transition from a rather dense to a more multibranched growth is presented. In the first…
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,…
Statistical physics can describe the behavior of microbial populations consisting of many heterogeneous individuals. A direct consequence is the existence of phase transitions, where the behavior of a population changes discontinuously upon…
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…
A central question in developmental biology is how size and position are determined. The genetic code carries instructions on how to control these properties in order to regulate the pattern and morphology of structures in the developing…
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…
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…
A geophylogeny is a phylogenetic tree (or dendrogram) where each leaf (e.g. biological taxon) has an associated geographic location (site). To clearly visualize a geophylogeny, the tree is typically represented as a crossing-free drawing…
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…
Most biological data are multidimensional, posing a major challenge to human comprehension and computational analysis. Principal component analysis is the most popular approach to rendering two- or three-dimensional representations of the…
It is shown here that fracture after a brief plastic strain, typically of a few percents, is a necessary consequence of the polycrystalline nature of the materials. The polycrystal undergoing plastic deformation is modeled as a flowing…
Understanding the evolution of a set of genes or species is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. The problem we study here takes as input a set of trees describing {possibly discordant} evolutionary scenarios for a given set of…
Modeling the spontaneous evolution of morphology in natural systems and its preservation by proportionate growth remains a major scientific challenge. Yet, it is conceivable that if the basic mechanisms of growth and the coupled kinetic…