Section: New Results

Towards construction of digital atlases of plant tissues

Participants : Gaël Michelin, Grégoire Malandain.

This work is made in collaboration with Yassin Refahi (Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge university), Jonathan Legrand, Jan Traas (RDP, ENS Lyon, INRA, CNRS, Lyon) and Christophe Godin (Inria Virtual Plants team, Montpellier).

In developmental biology, the study of model organisms aims for the understanding of genetic mechanisms responsible of morphogenesis. Today, fluorescent confocal microscopy is a means for in vivo imaging of developing plants at cell level with a high spatio-temporal resolution.

We propose in this work some dedicated computational tools for the study of such 3D+t sequences. These methods offer the means to compare temporal sequences of flower development and to build 4D digital atlases of developing arabidposis floral meristems on which every individual can be projected (figure 13), opening the avenue to the statical analysis of populations.

Figure 13. Visualization of the valid spatio-temporal sample alignments following the proposed registration method at different floral meristem developmental phases. One can observe the reliability of the registration method to identify developmental phases equivalences between the different samples.