Output details
11 - Computer Science and Informatics
University of East Anglia
Genetic control of organ shape and tissue polarity
<28>The complex 3D shape of the snapdragon flower emerges from a simple shape with few hundred cells. Understanding this represented a challenge that forced us to develop algorithms consistent with every aspect of the physics, chemistry and biology. The results were widely reported (e.g. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-dragon-snap.html) but the underlying work lay with relating the ‘physics’ from Output 1 to known and hypothetical patterns of gene expression. We verified the model by predicting the shapes of ten novel mutant flowers which were shown, using mutant/transgenic plants, to be consistent with the biological shapes (Cui M-L et.al. (2010) PLoS Biol 8(11): e1000538).