Inferring leaf blade development from examples

Abstract

Morphogenesis is the process by which plant tissues are organized and differentiated to determine the morphological structure of their organs. Understanding leaf blade morphogenesis is a major unsolved challenge in plant sciences. Despite the advances, until now there is no a clear understanding of the physiological mechanisms underlying these morphological changes. In this work, we present a novel automatic approach to infer the geometrical structure of a leaf blade developmental model out of samples of sequences of the leaf development. The main idea is to infer the set of parameters of a non-linear ordinary differential equation model based on relative elementary rates of growth, which better adjusts an empirical leaf blade developmental sequence that was extracted from real images. From the resulting models leaf shape simulations were calculated. These simulations were compared against the 12 real sequences of leaf blade growing. The results show that the proposed method is able properly infer leaf blade parameters of leaf development for a variety of leaf shapes, both in simulated and real sequences.