A 3D morpho-space of sepal geometry reveals the importance of organ curvature.

Abstract

How robust three-dimension (3D) organ shape emerges during morphogenesis is a fundamental question in biology. Addressing this question requires a comprehensive quantification of organ geometry in 3D. To tackle these issues, we considered the sepal of Arabidopsis as a model. Using a unique pipeline allowing to recover 3D sepal morphology, we analysed fifteen mutants affected in different pathways. The results of a Principal Component Analysis reveal sepal curvature as an important parameter accounting for variations in sepal morphology within genotypes. Unexpectedly, despite genetic homogeneity of the wild-type plants and reproducible culture conditions, we found a significant level of variability in sepal morphology. Our data also show that sepal shape from wild-type plants is more robust (less variable) than sepal size, hinting to a possible selective pressure on shape parameters.

Code and data availability

The paper's data availability statement explicitly deposits the phenotyping assets (original sepal images, segmented images, and sepal measurements) on recherche.data.gouv.fr under DOI 10.57745/LTTTBK. No custom code was developed; analysis used standard Python libraries, so no code asset qualifies.