Cory Tobin

Cells in the Arabidopsis shoot apical meristem are small and divide frequently throughout the life-time of the organism making them good candidates for studying the mechanisms of cell division in plants. But tracking these cell divisions requires multiple images to be taken of the same specimen over time which means the specimen must stay alive throughout the process. This chapter provides details on how to prepare plants for live imaging, keep them alive and growing through multiple time points, and how to process the data to extract cell boundary coordinates from three-dimensional images.

The emerging field of computational morphodynamics aims to understand the changes that occur in space and time during development by combining three technical strategies: live imaging to observe development as it happens; image processing and analysis to extract quantitative information; and computational modelling to express and test time-dependent hypotheses. The strength of the field comes from the iterative and combined use of these techniques, which has provided important insights into plant development.

Computational morphodynamics utilizes computer modeling to understand the development of living organisms over space and time. Results from biological experiments are used to construct accurate and predictive models of growth. These models are then used to make novel predictions that provide further insight into the processes involved, which can be tested experimentally to either confirm or rule out the validity of the computational models. This review highlights two fundamental challenges: (a) to understand the feedback between mechanics of growth and chemical or molecular signaling, and (b) to design models that span and integrate single cell behavior with tissue development. We review different approaches to model plant growth and discuss a variety of model types that can be implemented to demonstrate how the interplay between computational modeling and experimentation can be used to explore the morphodynamics of plant development.