Simulating leaf growth dynamics through Metropolis-Monte Carlo based energy minimization

Throughout their life span, plants maintain the ability to generate new organs, such as leaves. This is normally done in an orderly way by activating limited groups of dormant cells to divide and grow. It is currently not understood how that process is precisely regulated. We have used the VirtualLeaf framework for plant organ growth modeling to simulate the typical developmental stages of leaves of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. For that purpose the Hamiltonian central to the Monte-Carlo based mechanical equilibration of VirtualLeaf was modified. A basic two-dimensional model was defined starting from a rectangular grid with a dynamic phytohormone gradient that spatially instructs the cells in the growing leaf. Our results demonstrate that such a mechanism can indeed reproduce various spatio-temporal characteristics of leaf development and provides clues for further model development.