Self-similar Analysis of Plant Architecture Reveals Hierarchical Classes of Meristem States

Christophe Godin (1, 2) , Pascal Ferraro (3)

1 VIRTUAL PLANTS - Modeling plant morphogenesis at different scales, from genes to phenotype
2 UMR DAP - Développement et amélioration des plantes
3 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

Apical meristems are small embryogenic regions, located at the tip of plant axes, that build up plant organs by cellular division. The production of the meristems depends on their internal physical, physiological and genetic state and is controled by contextual factors (like micro-environment, availability of nutrients, etc.). In principle, the number of variables that may be used to define the state of a meristem, taking account the nature and the concentrations of molecules in each cell, their position, the physical stresses at each point, the geometry of cells, their genetic contents, etc., is infinitely large. Due to this intrinsic complexity, and to the current lack of hindsight on processes at such small scales, the connection between a meristem state, its micro-environment and what it produces at varying time scales seems until now largely out of reach.

Mots clés: plant architecture; self-similarity; meristem; differentiation; physiological age; tree reduction; inverse problem

Domaines: Autre [cs.OH]

Christophe Godin, Pascal Ferraro. Self-similar Analysis of Plant Architecture Reveals Hierarchical Classes of Meristem States. 5th International Workshop on Functional Structural Plant Models, Nov 2007, Napier, New Zealand. pp.481-484. ⟨hal-00306626⟩