Integrating Physiology and Architecture in Models of Fruit Expansion

Abstract

Architectural properties of a fruit, such as its shape, vascular patterns, and skin morphology, play a significant role in determining the distributions of water, carbohydrates, and nutrients inside the fruit. Understanding the impact of these properties on fruit quality is difficult because they develop over time and are highly dependent on both genetic and environmental controls. We present a 3D functional-structural fruit model that can be used to investigate effects of the principle architectural properties on fruit quality. We use a three step modeling pipeline in the OpenAlea platform: (1) creating a 3D volumetric mesh representation of the internal and external fruit structure, (2) generating a complex network of vasculature that is embedded within this mesh, and (3) integrating aspects of the fruit's function, such as water and dry matter transport, with the fruit's structure. We restrict our approach to the phase where fruit growth is mostly due to cell expansion and the fruit has already differentiated into different tissue types. We show how fruit shape affects vascular patterns and, as a consequence, the distribution of sugar/water in tomato fruit. Furthermore, we show that strong interaction between tomato fruit shape and vessel density induces, independently of size, an important and contrasted gradient of water supply from the pedicel to the blossom end of the fruit. We also demonstrate how skin morphology related to microcracking distribution affects the distribution of water and sugars inside nectarine fruit. Our results show that such a generic model permits detailed studies of various, unexplored architectural features affecting fruit quality development.

Spatial and temporal evolution of quantitative magnetic resonance imaging parameters of peach and apple fruit – relationship with biophysical and metabolic traits

“…Such studies are critical to the exploration of biological regulation and the interpretation of experimental data (Génard et al ., 2014). At fruit level, modeling approaches have evidenced interactions between the structural and functional properties of tissues, during both the growth (Cieslak et al ., 2016) and the post‐harvest (Mebatsion et al ., 2009) periods.…”

“…Understanding the interplay between genotype‐specific architecture, physiological processes and environmental factors in the control of fruit development is a key factor in reducing the ecological footprint of horticulture. Indeed, architectural properties of fruit such as shape, vascular patterns and skin morphology have been shown to play a significant role in determining the distribution of water, carbohydrates, gases and nutrients within the fruit (Herremans et al ., 2015; Cieslak et al ., 2016). The structural and physiological properties of fruit have been addressed in several fields, including genetics, plant physiology, agronomy and post‐harvest technology.…”

Modelling the physiological relevance of sucrose export repression by an Flowering Time homolog in the long‐distance phloem of potato

“…Another important extension would be to explicitly include tuber growth and couple this to the transport model. While organ growth has been extensively modelled for swelling fruits such as tomato, kiwi, peach and grapes (Cieslak et al, 2016; Fishman & Génard, 1998; Hall, Minchin, Clearwater, & Génard, 2013; Zhu et al, 2019), tuber expansion arises through a combination of cell division and swelling, requiring more sophisticated organ growth modelling (Vreugdenhil, Chun, Jung, van Lammeren, & Ewing, 1999). To enable the investigation of resource competition between organs, as well as source‐sink distance on sink resource uptake it will be necessary to replace the single, unbranched, source‐sink architecture applied here with a more realistic plant architecture.…”

Shaping the Organ: A Biologist Guide to Quantitative Models of Plant Morphogenesis

“…L-systems are versatile parametric models that allow the incorporation of molecular-level processes and genetic regulatory networks, and they have been used to recreate the vegetative development of simple multicellular organisms like Anabaena ( Lindenmayer, 1975 ) or complex forms such as trees ( Allen et al, 2005 ). This technique has been successfully applied to important research topics in plant development including phyllotactic patterning ( Strauss et al, 2020 ), epidermal cell shapes ( Sapala et al, 2018 ), leaf shape emergence ( Runions et al, 2017 ), virtual crop generation ( Marshall-Colon et al, 2017 ), auxin-driven patterning ( Cieslak et al, 2015 ), control of bud activation ( Prusinkiewicz et al, 2009 ), apical hook formation ( Žádníková et al, 2016 ), fruit expansion ( Cieslak et al, 2016 ), and inflorescence ( Owens et al, 2016 ). L-systems can integrate external stimulus (i.e., temperature effect) and allow the prediction of plant phenotypes ( Palubicki et al, 2009 ).…”