Abstract

We face many problems in our world including the effects of climates change. As a result we need more resilient crops. However we do not have the fundamental understanding of how plants grow in order to accomplish this goal.

In this talk I shall be detailing work from my PhD on how do plants grow. I shall begin at the microscale where we used continuum mechanics and asymptotic analysis to examine how the cell wall is connected and loosened. At the cell scale we look at how some plant cell types form jigsaw-like shapes, using a visco-elastic anisotropic vertex element model combined with a system of reaction diffusion equations interacting with a stochastic cytoskeleton model. I shall also quickly review my current research at the tissue scale, focussed on the impact of plant cell division and different cell setups on tissue mechanics and cell-cell signalling.