Related papers: Root growth and force chains in a granular soil
The role of plastic deformation in the high-pressure compaction of granular material is investigated using bonded particle model simulations. Grains are discretized into a set of computational particles connected by pairwise bonds. Bonds…
Several experiments have demonstrated the existence of an electro-mechanical effect in many biological tissues and hydrogels, and its actual influence on growth, migration, and pattern formation. Here, to model these interactions and…
Lotus leaves floating on water usually experience short-wavelength edge wrinkling that decays toward the center, while the leaves growing above water normally morph into a global bending cone shape with long rippled waves near the edge.…
Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…
In this work, a new model for macroscopic plant tissue growth based on dynamical Riemannian geometry is presented. We treat 1D and 2D tissues as continuous, deformable, growing geometries for sizes larger than 1mm. The dynamics of the…
Predicting rapid and slower soil evolution remains a scientific challenge. This process involves poorly understood aspects of disordered granular matter and dense suspension dynamics. This study presents a novel two-dimensional experiment…
The growth of plants is a hydromechanical phenomenon in which cells enlarge by absorbing water, while their walls expand and remodel under turgor-induced tension. In multicellular tissues, where cells are mechanically interconnected,…
Grain piles embody the complex mechanics and kinematics of disordered granular materials, including solid-like and fluid-like behaviours, complex kinematics, and preparation history-dependent stress variation. It is widely believed that the…
Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…
Granular heaps are critical in both industrial applications and natural processes, exhibiting complex behaviors that have sparked significant research interest. The stress dip phenomenon observed beneath granular heaps continues to be a…
Everyday experience shows that cellular sheets are stiffened by the presence of a pressurized gas: from bicycle inner tubes to bubble wrap, the presence of an internal pressure increases the stiffness of otherwise floppy structures. The…
Shape is one of the important characteristics for the structures observed in living organisms. Whereas biologists have proposed models where the shape is controlled on a molecular level [1], physicists, following Turing [2] and d'Arcy…
The growth and scaling of organs is a fundamental aspect of animal development. However, how organs grow to the right size and shape required by physiological demands, remains largely unknown. Here, we provide a framework combining theory…
The characterisation of the spatial and temporal distribution of the root system in a cultivated field depends on the soil volume occupied by the root systems (the scatter), and the local intensity of the root colonisation in the field (the…
Biological growth is often driven by mechanical cues, such as changes in external pressure or tensile loading. Moreover, it is well known that many living tissues actively maintain a preferred level of mechanical internal stress, called the…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
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…
Tendrils coil their shape to anchor the plant to supporting structures, allowing vertical growth toward light. Although climbing plants have been studied for a long time, extracting information regarding the relationship between the…
Vegetation patterns, a natural phenomenon observed worldwide, are typically driven by spatially distributed feedback. However, the spatial colonization mechanisms of clonal plants, driven by the growth of a rhizome, are usually not…
Plants live in constantly moving fluid, whether air or water. In response to the loads associated with fluid motion, plants bend and twist, often with great amplitude. These large deformations are not found in traditional engineering…