Publication Date:
2012-03-17
Description:
Various plants and fungi have evolved ingenious devices to disperse their spores. One such mechanism is the cavitation-triggered catapult of fern sporangia. The spherical sporangia enclosing the spores are equipped with a row of 12 to 13 specialized cells, the annulus. When dehydrating, these cells induce a dramatic change of curvature in the sporangium, which is released abruptly after the cavitation of the annulus cells. The entire ejection process is reminiscent of human-made catapults with one notable exception: The sporangia lack the crossbar that arrests the catapult arm in its returning motion. We show that much of the sophistication and efficiency of the ejection mechanism lies in the two very different time scales associated with the annulus closure.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Noblin, X -- Rojas, N O -- Westbrook, J -- Llorens, C -- Argentina, M -- Dumais, J -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2012 Mar 16;335(6074):1322. doi: 10.1126/science.1215985.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Universite de Nice Sophia Antipolis (UNS), Laboratoire de Physique de la Matiere Condensee, CNRS UMR 7336, Nice, France. xavier.noblin@unice.fr〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22422975" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Cell Shape
;
Elasticity
;
Polypodium/cytology/*physiology
;
Sporangia/cytology/*physiology
;
Spores/*physiology
;
Water
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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