Graphic depicting the Plant Automatic Cell Lineage Reconstruction project. Illustration by Elise Laruelle and leaf images by Kumud Saini.
Elise Laruelle and Sarah Robinson have been awarded funding from the University of Cambridge's Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery and the Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3) to train a neural network to recognise “sister cells” in mature plant leaves and reconstruct their complete cell division history from a single image.
The project is in collaboration with Carola Bibiane Schönlieb and her Cambridge Image Analsysis Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
The Plant automatic cell lineage reconstruction project aims to eliminate the need for damaging repeated imaging when studying how factors influence plant development.
Understanding how plants develop requires tracking individual cells over many days which is time consuming and can be stressful for the plants. It therefore serves as a bottle neck for research.
This project aims to train a neural network to recognise “sister cells” in mature plant leaves and reconstruct their complete cell lineage from a single image, reducing the need for repeated imaging.
This advancement will make it easier for scientists to study how temperature and other factors influence plant development.
The Robinson Group uses a combination of novel biophysical tools, genetic manipulation and mathematical modelling to investigate how plant development (cell division and cell expansion) is controlled.