Blooming Numbers digital tour

Flowers are more than just beautiful. Their colours, shapes and patterns have evolved to attract pollinators, protect pollen, and support seed dispersal.

Blooming Numbers was an interactive exhibit at the RHS Chelsea Flower show 2025 showcasing the latest discoveries in fundamental plant development research, following a flower’s journey from a single cell to a fully formed bloom. It explored how evolutionary adaptations enhance pollination, seed dispersal and plant survival.

Digital tour

If you couldn’t join us at Chelsea, we’re bringing the experience to you. Scroll down to explore the posters and videos that made up the exhibit to discover why we take a quantitative approach to how we study plants by combining experiments with computational modelling.

Blooming numbers

How a quantitative approach helps us to understand plants

Our mission at the Sainsbury Laboratory is to advance our understanding of how plants develop, change, and respond to the environment.

To do this we:

1. Research across scales
We investigate the fundamental processes that regulate plant development across multiple scales, from molecular biology to cells, mechanics, individual plants, populations and ecosystems.

2. Take an interdisciplinary approach
We bring together specialists and techniques from diverse fields with mechanics, molecular biology, genetics, genomics, imaging, computational modelling, evolution, and mathematics.

3. Use new technologies
We work with a broad range of species, use and develop cutting-edge tools, including high-resolution microscopy, advanced modelling, and specialised genetic reporters.

Starting with the flower

Starting with the flower, Blooming Numbers explores the complex processes of plant development—a field still full of scientific questions. 

Floral genetics

How shared genes lead to a world of flowers

Even though fowers like grasses, roses, and orchids look completely different, they often use the same core genetic instructions.

We begin our journey with a broad view of the fascinating diversity in flower structures . At this science station visitors were invited to dissect a diversity of different flowers to examine under a stereo microscope and explore the different flower structures.

Zooming in: Flowers at the microscale

Building on our exploration of floral diversity, we now zoom into the cellular level to see floral organs under the microscope. Using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), visitors explored the intricate structures of these organs in incredible detail. This microscopic view reveals the hidden beauty of flowers. 

How scanning electron microscopes reveal a hidden plant world

Unlike the microscope that you might have used in high school biology, a scanning electron microscope (SEM) uses a beam of electrons instead of light to “see” an image.

Scanning electron microscopes (SEM) let us observe nanoscale structures as small as one millionth of a millimetre. Both conventional and cryo-SEM (a technique where samples are rapidly frozen to preserve their natural hydrated state) are often coated with metals like gold, palladium, platinum, or iridium to improve image quality.

Nurseries and specialist growers exhibiting at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025 brought over flower samples to be imaged onsite at the show using the scanning electron microscope at the Sainsbury Laboratory exhibit. These images were captured within a couple of minutes of the sample being loaded into the microscope. Top from left, daisy capitulum showing individual disc florets arranged in Fibonacci spiral, Dendrobium orchid seeds, edge of protea flower, Rosa glauca stigma and anthers. Middle from left, Hibscus trionum pollen grain, close-up of Stipa gigantea stigma, oat awn and dandelion seed. Bottom from left, Stipa gigantea flower, Stipa gigantea awn fluff, sand grass cross-section, cells on border between red-white colour on Dianthus petal.

Focusing on petals

While petals are often admired for their beauty, their primary purpose is to attract pollinators. At this station, visitors discovered the fascinating mechanisms behind petal patterning and how they serve as signals to guide pollinators to nectar and pollen. 

How evolution modifies floral patterns to attract pollinators

At the Sainsbury Laboratory we are identifying genes that plants use to produce these patterns.

To understand how petal patterns develop, evolve and function, we developed a small species of Hibiscus as a new experimental model and we combine genetics and biochemistry approaches with microscopy techniques, modelling and behavioural experiments with bumblebees.

Pollinators and fowering plants evolved together, creating the multitude of petal patterns we see today.

Plants use both colour and cell shape patterns to attract pollinators.

Building a 4D virtual flower

How we are tackling the grand challenge of re-engineering the flower

How does a group of identical cells transform into a fower?

Symmetry breaking is the process in which identical cells take on distinct roles, forming structures like sepals, petals, stamens and carpels in flowers.

To understand how symmetry breaking happens we aim to build a 3D virtual flower over time by imaging and simulating growth and development. We will use experiments to test our virtual model.

Evolution of plant development

To understand how flower traits have evolved over time, we need to take an evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) approach. At this station, visitors will learn how computational models are used to simulate the longterm evolution of plant development. 

Seeds of uncertainty

How plants hedge their bets for survival

Imagine planting two identical seeds in the same pot with the same soil and sunlight. You’d expect them to germinate at the same time and grow the same way—but sometimes one germinates sooner, grows taller or blooms faster. That’s not because the seed is “better” or the conditions were truly different—it’s because of tiny random differences in gene expression. We call this stochasticity.

Dynamic plants

Gene regulatory networks and gene expression all contribute to how a plant responds to its environment. Plant hormones are the messengers that tell specific parts of plants how to grow and respond.

Find out about advanced biosensors that are revealing for the first time hormone dynamics. 

Plant hormones are messengers that plants require for growth.

Seedlings have different growth patterns when they grow in the light or the dark. In the dark they need to elongate quickly to reach the surface where they then get exposed to light. Upon light exposure the developmental program shifts, growth slows and the cotyledons begin to open and expand.  

We use FRET based biosensors to determine the relative level of hormone in living cells giving us a method to detect hormones in a spatio temporal fashion. That is to say we can see what hormone levels are doing in individual cells over time. We use the emission ratio of the sensor (CFP donor to YFP acceptor) to determine the level of hormone. These emission ratios are then false coloured with whites and reds being high levels of the hormone and blues and greens being lower levels.  

Biosensors allow us to observe the relative hormone levels and how patterns form in real time by imaging seedlings.

Watch the below video videos of plants germinating and growing and how biosensors are revealing plant hormone patterns never before visualised.

Plant biomechanics

How biomechanics drives plant growth, structure and movement

Understanding mechanical properties

Biomechanics refers to the study of the mechanical principles of living organisms, particularly their movement and structure. We use a combination of novel biophysical tools, genetic manipulation and mathematical modelling to investigate how plant development (cell division and cell expansion) is controlled.

Power to the flower

How soil fungi and bacteria help feed plants

Turbocharging plants

To grow and flower, plants get nutrients from microbes. These microbes live inside their roots. Plant microbe friendships date back hundreds of millions of years.

Communication across the membrane

Though these microbes live inside plant roots, they’re separated from the plant's cytoplasm by a membrane. Our research aims to understand how microbes and plants exchange nutrients and information across this interface.