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Article: Ruffles could be plants' stretch marks.(The Dallas Morning News)
- Article from:
- Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
- Article date:
- October 21, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Physicists, who ponder such questions as how soap film forms and how sand grains interact, can now explain why daffodils crinkle.
Flowers and leaves may have wavy edges because they grow too fast, say University of Texas at Austin scientists. Paint a little growth hormone on the edge of a normally flat leaf and it will develop a distinct ruffle, they have found.
If true, the work suggests that plants needn't have evolved genes that specifically instruct leaves to curl up or down. A simpler instruction _ to grow fast around the edges _ is all that's needed, the physicists wrote in a recent issue of Nature.
The same pattern can be seen by ripping ...