How do plants make spiral patterns?
Researchers have developed a mathematical model that can accurately recreate spiral patterns seen in plants.
Plants grow throughout their lifetime, forming new flowers and leaves at the tips of their stems through a patterning process called phyllotaxis, which occurs in spirals for a vast number of plant species. The classical view suggests that the positioning of each new leaf or flower bud at the tip of a growing stem is based on a small set of principles. This includes the idea that buds produce inhibitory signals that prevent other buds from forming too close to each other. When computational models of phyllotaxis follow these ‘deterministic’ principles, they are able to recreate the spiral pattern the buds form on a growing stem.
In real plants, however, the spiral pattern is not always perfect. The observed disturbances in the pattern are believed to reflect the presence of random fluctuations — regarded as noise — in phyllotaxis. Now, using numerical simulations, Yassin Refai and colleagues noticed that the patterns of inhibitory signals in a shoot tip pre-determine the locations of several competing sites where buds could form in a robust manner. However, random fluctuations in the way cells perceive these inhibitory signals could greatly disturb the timing of organ formation and affect phyllotaxis patterns.
Building on this, Refahi and colleagues created a new computational model of bud patterning that takes into account some randomness in how cells perceive the inhibitory signals released by existing buds. The model can accurately recreate the classical spiral patterns of buds and also produces occasional disrupted patterns that are similar to those seen in real plants. Unexpectedly, Refahi and colleagues show that these ‘errors’ reveal key information about how the signals that control phyllotaxis might work.
These findings open up new avenues of research into the role of noise in phyllotaxis. The model can be used to predict how altering the activities of genes or varying plant growth conditions might disturb this patterning process. Furthermore, the work highlights how the structure of disturbances in a biological system can shed new light on how the system works.
To find out more
Read the eLife research paper on which this eLife digest is based: “A stochastic multicellular model identifies biological watermarks from disorders in self-organized patterns of phyllotaxis” (July 6, 2016).
