Mimicry has evolved in plants for a number of traits, both floral and vegetative. The discovery of a vine that mimics the leaf shape of different hosts poses new questions about the function of leaf mimicry, interplant signalling and leaf development.

This article presents a novel method for classification of plants using their leaves. Most plant species have unique leaves which differ from each other by characteristics such as the shape, colour, texture and the margin. The method introduced in this study proposes to use two of these features: the shape and the texture. The shape-based method will extract the contour signature from every lea...

For planar landmark based shapes, taking into account the non-Euclidean geometry of the shape space, a statistical test for a common mean first geodesic principal component (GPC) is devised which rests on one of two asymptotic scenarios. For both scenarios, strong consistency and central limit theorems are established, along with an algorithm for the computation of a Ziezold mean geodesic. In a...

Leaves are packed in a bud in different ways, being flat, enrolled, or folded, but always filling the whole bud volume. This « filling law » has many consequences, in particular on the shape of growing folded leaves. This is shown here for different types of folding and packing. The folded volume is always part of an ellipsoid, with the veins on the outside rounded face, and the lamina margin o...

Long leaves in terrestrial plants and their submarine counterparts, algal blades, have a typical, saddle-like midsurface and rippled edges. To understand the origin of these morphologies, we dissect leaves and differentially stretch foam ribbons to show that these shapes arise from a simple cause, the elastic relaxation via bending that follows either differential growth (in leaves) or differen...

The innumerable shapes of plant leaves present a challenge to the explanatory power of biophysical theory. A model is needed that can produce these shapes with a small set of parameters. This paper presents a simple model of leaf shape based on a growth algorithm, which governs the growth rate of leaf tissue in two dimensions and hence the outline of the leaf. The growth of leaf lobes is govern...

Leaves are formed from a group of initial cells within the meristem. One of the earliest markers of leaf initiation is the down-regulation of KNOX genes in initial cells. Polar auxin activity, MYB and LOB domain transcription factors function to keep KNOX out of the initiating leaf. If KNOX genes are expressed in initial cells, leaves fail to form. As the leaf grows away from the meristem, its ...

Information integration and retrieval have been important problems for many information systems — it is hard to combine new information with any other piece of related information we already possess, and to make them both available for application queries. Many ontologybased applications are still cautious about integrating and retrieving information from natural language (NL) documents, prefer...