Thicker leaves allow plants to grow in water-limited conditions. However, our understanding of the genetic underpinnings of this highly functional leaf shape trait is poor. We used a custom-built confocal profilometer to directly measure leaf thickness in a set of introgression lines (ILs) derived from the desert tomato Solanum pennellii and identified quantitative trait loci. We report evidenc...

Leafy heads of cabbage (Brassica oleracea), Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa), and lettuce (Lactuca sativa) are composed of extremely incurved leaves. The shape of these heads often dictates the quality, and thus the commercial value, of these crops. Using quantitative trait locus mapping of head traits within a population of 150 recombinant inbred lines of Chinese cabbage, we investigated the re...

Variation in the size, shape, and positioning of leaves as the major photosynthetic organs strongly impacts crop yield, and optimizing these aspects is a central aim of cereal breeding [1, 2]. Leaf growth in grasses is driven by cell proliferation and cell expansion in a basal growth zone [3]. Although several factors influencing final leaf size and shape have been identified from rice and maiz...

Plant has plenty use in foodstuff, medicine and industry. And it is also vitally important for environmental protection. However, it is an important and difficult task to recognize plant species on earth. Designing a convenient and automatic recognition system of plants is necessary and useful since it can facilitate fast classifying plants, and understanding and managing them. In this paper, a...

What causes the domesticated tomato Solanum lycopersicum to have sweet, juicy red fruit and large, compound leaves with narrow-tipped leaflets while its distant wild relative, the Peruvian Solanum pennellii, has small, soapy-smelling green fruit with an unpleasant flavor (Matsui et al., 2007) and small compound leaves with thick, rounded leaflets (see figure)? Thoroughly answering this question...

Our work evaluates the variation of Dosimetric Leaf Gap (DLG) along the travel path of each Varian Millennium 120-MLC leaf pairs. Traditionally, the Treatment Planning Systems (TPS) utilize a single value of DLG measured under the middle leaf-pair. The TPS models the shape of the leaf tip as straight as opposed to rounded edge. To overcome this limitation, the TPS retracts each leaf tip by half...

Leaves in tropical forests come in an enormous variety of sizes and shapes, each of which can be ultimately viewed as an adaptation to the complex problem of optimising the capture of light for photosynthesis. However, the fact that many different shape “strategies” coexist within a habitat demonstrate that there are many other intrinsic and extrinsic factors involved, such as the differential ...

The role of cell division as a causal element in plant morphogenesis is debatable, with accumulating evidence supporting the action of cell division-independent mechanisms. To directly test the morphogenic function of cell division, we have utilised a microinduction technique to locally and transiently manipulate the expression in transgenic plants of two genes encoding putative effectors of th...

We describe a working computer vision system that aids in the identification of plant species. A user photographs an isolated leaf on a blank background, and the system extracts the leaf shape and matches it to the shape of leaves of known species. In a few seconds, the system displays the top matching species, along with textual descriptions and additional images. This system is currently in u...

A stack of 66 historical Indian palm leaves, which were produced in the 8 Century AD, is kept in the Museum Rietberg, Zuerich. On the leaves, there are figures and a long poem, inscribed in ancient Sanskrit language and narrating a love story. The original sequence of the leaves was lost long time ago. At one point in history, the stack of the leaves was damaged by a mouse biting pieces off. On...