Achievement

It is of broad interest to the field of plant sciences and overcoming food shortage as all plant structures can be derived from leaves under the appropriate hormonal and transcription factor conditions. In a field where the paradigm of data analysis is to analyze microscopy videos tediously by hand, we are the first to efficiently and automatically, without manual subjectivity, deploy software to analyze pavement cell microtubule growth and morphology. The mutant armadillo repeat kinesin 2-1d (ark2-1d) was identified to: (1) cause poor inter-digitation between cells. (2) disrupt normal ordering of microtubule growth. A novel procedure for quantifying the direction of microtubule growth was proposed that discriminates between microtubules and background texture. It was found that ark2-1d is significantly different (p <.05) from the wild type. Published in IEEE ISBI Conference, May 2013.