A new study highlights areas of compatibility and strategies to move towards better communication and collaboration.
Continue reading Connecting plant phenotyping and modelling communities
Botanists find that during soil drying, stomatal regulation is controlled by below-ground hydraulics in a predictable way.
Continue reading Below-ground hydraulics control stomatal closure
Tired: Remembering if ‘ACi_sol_C_1.xlsx’ or ‘ACi_sol_D_v3.xlsx’ has correct parameter estimates. Wired: Using reproducible, scalable code to analyse data.
Continue reading Principles of resilient coding for plant ecophysiologists
A new model simulates rhizodeposition patterns around growing and exuding root systems.
Continue reading 3D model of rhizodeposition
How can plant modelers introduce a genetic dimension into physiological models at different organizational scales in a meaningful way?
Continue reading The Role of Adaptive Strategies in Plant Modelling
One way to improve crop yields is to improve photosynthesis, but how can scientists do this? Alexandrina Stirbet and colleagues review mathematical modelling as a tool for studying photosynthesis, as part of a special issue on Functional-Structural Plant Modelling in Annals of Botany. “Oxygenic photosynthesis is a very important process, not only because it is the source of our food, fibre and many useful substances, but also because almost all life on the Earth depends on it, either directly or indirectly,” write Stirbet and colleagues. “Plants, algae and cyanobacteria are oxygenic photosynthetizers that use light energy to generate organic molecules...
Continue reading Computing modelling and photosynthesis
Credibility and transdisciplinarity play crucial roles in modelling to advance crop adaptation and plant improvement.
Continue reading Modelling practices that support crop improvement
Global sensitivity analysis was used to identify key traits for Eucalyptus adaptation to climate variability and change in Brazil.
Continue reading Key Eucalyptus traits for high yield under climate change identified
Study proposes a new computer model for simulating macadamia tree carbon allocation.
Continue reading Going nuts: simulating macadamia’s carbon allocation in Australia
CPlantBox generates a variety of 3D full plant architectures and accurately simulates water and carbon flow in the full plant.
Continue reading A new whole-plant framework simulates realistic water and carbon flow
Secondary growth is a process related to the formation of new cells that increase in size and wall thickness during xylogenesis. Temporal dynamics of wood formation influence cell traits, in turn affecting cell patterns across the tree ring. Buttò et al. verified the hypothesis that cell diameter and cell wall thickness are positively correlated with the duration of their differentiation phases. At all sites, larger cell diameters and cell wall thicknesses were observed in cells that experienced a longer period of differentiation. The relationship was a non-linear, decreasing trend that occasionally resulted in a clear asymptote. Overall, secondary wall deposition...
Continue reading Relationship between duration of cell differentiation and xylem traits
There were many great articles concerning cross-disciplinary research at the interface between plant biology, mathematics and computer science before the launch in silico Plants (isP). We are excited for isP to be home to these types of articles in the future.
Continue reading Integrated approach to maximize trait selection
How can we improve crops in the future? One method would be to improve the photosynthesis process in crops, to increase productivity from the same plants. However, there isn’t a lot of research connecting leaf-level photosynthetic manipulation and crop performance. A new software package developed by Wu et al. produces a model of diurnal crop canopy photosynthesis for well-watered conditions using biochemical models of C3 and C4 photosynthesis scaled to the canopy level using the sun–shade leaves representation of the canopy. The model simulated the expected responses in diurnal (sunrise to sunset) canopy photosynthesis and daily crop biomass accumulation to...
Continue reading A software package to simulate daily field crop canopy photosynthesis
The shape of the root system creates a lot of the context for plants to interact with a source of nutrients, water and pathogens. If you can characterize root system architecture, then you can investigate root functions and interactions. However, examining this is difficult, partly for the obvious reason that soil is difficult to see through, but also because root systems are plastic (in this meaning, easily changeable and reformed). To examine root systems, Loïc Pagès and Jocelyne Kervella examined roots of 60 species growing in natura and measured them against five traits: extreme tip diameters (Dmin and Dmax) relative...
Continue reading Seeking stable traits to characterize the root system architectureBotany One is a blog run by the Annals of Botany Company, a non-profit educational charity.
In addition to Botany One, the company currently publishes three journals, the Annals of Botany, AoB PLANTS, and in silico Plants.
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