Kim Kenobi

The ability to quantify the geometry of plant organs at the cellular scale can provide novel insights into their structural organization. Hitherto manual methods of measurement provide only very low throughput and subjective solutions, and often quantitative measurements are neglected in favour of a simple cell count.

A family of shape curves is introduced that is useful for modelling the changes in shape in a series of geometrical objects. The relationship between the preshape sphere and the shape space is used to define a general family of curves based on horizontal geodesics on the preshape sphere. Methods for fitting geodesics and more general curves in the non-Euclidean shape space of point sets are discussed, based on minimizing sums of squares of Procrustes distances. Likelihood-based inference is considered. We illustrate the ideas by carrying out statistical analysis of two-dimensional landmarks on rats’ skulls at various times in their development and three-dimensional landmarks on lumbar vertebrae from three primate species.

Microarrays are a powerful tool used for the determination of global RNA expression. There is an increasing requirement to focus on profiling gene expression in tissues where it is difficult to obtain large quantities of material, for example individual tissues within organs such as the root, or individual isolated cells. From such samples, it is difficult to produce the amount of RNA required for labelling and hybridisation in microarray experiments, thus a process of amplification is usually adopted. Despite the increasing use of two-cycle amplification for transcriptomic analyses on the Affymetrix ATH1 array, there has been no report investigating any potential bias in gene representation that may occur as a result.