Integrative Biology Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Plant Biology Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA.
Cell Syst. 2017 Jul 26;5(1):53-62.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cels.2017.06.017.
Transport networks serve critical functions in biological and engineered systems, and yet their design requires trade-offs between competing objectives. Due to their sessile lifestyle, plants need to optimize their architecture to efficiently acquire and distribute resources while also minimizing costs in building infrastructure. To understand how plants resolve this design trade-off, we used high-precision three-dimensional laser scanning to map the architectures of tomato, tobacco, or sorghum plants grown in several environmental conditions and through multiple developmental time points, scanning in total 505 architectures from 37 plants. Using a graph-theoretic algorithm that we developed to evaluate design strategies, we find that plant architectures lie along the Pareto front between two simple length-based objectives-minimizing total branch length and minimizing nutrient transport distance-thereby conferring a selective fitness advantage for plant transport processes. The location along the Pareto front can distinguish among species and conditions, suggesting that during evolution, natural selection may employ common network design principles despite different optimization trade-offs.
运输网络在生物和工程系统中起着至关重要的作用，但它们的设计需要在相互竞争的目标之间进行权衡。由于植物的固着生活方式，它们需要优化其架构，以有效地获取和分配资源，同时最大限度地减少基础设施建设的成本。为了了解植物如何解决这种设计上的权衡，我们使用高精度三维激光扫描技术来绘制在几种环境条件下生长的番茄、烟草或高粱植物的结构，并通过多个发育时间点进行扫描，总共从 37 株植物中扫描了 505 个结构。我们使用一种我们开发的图论算法来评估设计策略，发现植物结构沿着两个简单的基于长度的目标之间的帕累托前沿分布——最小化总分支长度和最小化养分运输距离——从而为植物运输过程赋予了选择性的适应优势。在帕累托前沿上的位置可以区分物种和条件，这表明在进化过程中，自然选择可能会采用通用的网络设计原则，尽管存在不同的优化权衡。
