BNMC seminar:  Reconstructing the Physiology of Extinct Plants using Mathematical Modeling

Jonathan Wilson
Postdoctoral Scholar
Geological and Planetary Sciences
Caltech

Plants, unlike animals, have much of their function encoded in their anatomy: rate-limiting steps of several physiological processes are often determined by dimensions of anatomical structures. For example, plants move water great distances by exploiting the relative humidity difference between the soil and the atmosphere. Natural selection has fine-tuned the morphology of wood cells to minimize hydraulic resistance, and this resistance can be quantified using mathematical models, allowing plant function to be read from tissue-level anatomy. Furthermore, xylem-containing tissues are among the most likely to be preserved in the fossil record, opening up a 400-million-year window into the coevolution of plant function and the environment. In this talk, I will focus on the evolution of water transport in plants, and how mathematical models derived from analysis of anatomical structures allow for quantitative estimates of extinct plant function and physiology.