Varuni Ankolekar, Quartesian
When you want to eat or prepare super delicious appetizers, one of the vegetables that come to mind is Cauliflower, which is also used to make many more dishes. Ever wondered about stunning beautiful patterns observed on Cauliflowers and found yourself lost while staring at this vegetable? If yes, the new research has revealed the reason behind the ‘fractal’ shape found in cauliflower and specifically in Romanesco cauliflower.
When you observe a Romanesco cauliflower, you will see are an amorphous blob that is strikingly regular all over. But if you observe closely, you will find that the florets are a few copies that are a miniature version of themselves. In Math, these never-ending patterns are called fractals. Fractals are self-similar, indefinite complex patterns present at different dimensions. To know why the Cauliflower, has these patterns a study was conducted by Godin and the team.
Such self-similarity is noticed in Cauliflower in seven or more copies of the “same” bud. Fractal patterns are eye-catching in Romanesco cauliflower that has swirling green cones to become head-like with several copies that are a miniature version of themselves. As per their research, it is the buds that we see in Cauliflower that fail to come to a flower. The meristems in these plants do not produce flowers but keep the “memory” of their transition to a floral state. The shape of the Romanesco cultivar is due to its stems a pyramid-like structure.
The study that was conducted to find the reason:
In modern plant biology, Arabidopsis thaliana is of paramount importance as its genetics have been studied for many years. In branches of Arabidopsis variants, similar patterns are followed with the same angle between each successive pair. Spirals both in clockwise and anticlockwise directions are seen if there are organs along this spiral formed due to gene networks.
As Arabidopsis variant share similar features as Cauliflower and can produce small cauliflower-like structures, Godin and his colleagues used it to experiment. They not only manipulated the genes of A. thaliana in computer simulations but also performed the experiments in the lab.
To study the peculiar shapes once few numbers of leaves appear, they developed a model that involves two main components. Information on spiral formation is seen in large cauliflowers, along with the model of the fundamental gene network observed in Arabidopsis. And then they tried to study both so that could find the genetics that led to the Romanesco cauliflower structure.
What did the study find?
Three genes were altered to grow a Romanesco-like head-on A. thaliana. Of which two of them hampered the growth of flower and in turn triggered runaway shoot growth. This resulted in the growth of a shoot instead of a flower which led to the growth of another shoot and so on like a chain reaction. This ultimately gave them a pyramidal-like appearance.
The fourth alternation of the gene was introduced that led to spiraling conical fractals formation as it increased the growing area at the terminal of every shoot and provided required space for the same.
Significance of the study:
The researchers have confirmed that by altering the genes in Arabidopsis cauliflower its growth was affected and was successfully able to turn it into a shape much like a miniature Romanesco. These experiments also disclosed that the gene-regulatory network of these undeveloped flowers causes the formation of cauliflower curd in Cauliflowers.
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Reference:
- Eugenio Azpeitia, Gabrielle Tichtinsky, Marie Le Masson, Antonio Serrano-Mislata, Jérémy Lucas, Veronica Gregis, Carlos Gimenez, Nathanaël Prunet, Etienne Farcot, Martin M. Kater, Desmond Bradley, Francisco Madueño, Christophe Godin, Francois Parcy. Cauliflower fractal forms arise from perturbations of floral gene networks, Science (2021). DOI:10.1126/science.abg5999
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