Floral bouquets are the most ephemeral of presents. The puzzle of how flowers get their shape, however, is more enduring. It’s a question that has kept Enrico Coen, a plant biologist at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom, busy for more than twenty years. Now he thinks he may finally have a handle on the answer, thanks to a clever combination of detailed image analysis and computer modeling—an approach typically applied to engineering problems.
Although there have been sustained efforts to identify genes involved in organ growth and shape in Drosophila, how genetics translate into the final shape of a wing, for example, is largely unknown. Coen and his colleagues used the flowers of Antirrhinum majus—better known as the snapdragon—to build a computational framework that would allow them to make experimentally testable predictions ...
