Vegetable fractals: how broccoli and cauliflower spirals are created

$Vegetable fractals: how broccoli and cauliflower spirals are created$

Creating the typical spirals in cabbage and broccoli are floral buds that have never managed to become flowers.

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In nature it is possible to observe a great variety of plants that develop foliage and flowers arranged at spiral. In some species, however, spirals constitute repetitive patterns known as fractals.

The result is a complicated and fascinating design that we can admire for example in cauliflower and broccoli, and it is precisely by observing the Brassicaceae that a group of French scientists wondered how fractals are created in these vegetables.

Thanks to mathematical and genetic analyzes, the researchers reproduced cauliflower and broccoli digitally and understood theorigin of the training of plant fractals.

To compose the spirals of cauliflower and broccoli are sequences of flower buds never bloomed. The meristems of these plants are therefore unable to form flowers but retain the "memory" of their transitory passage in a floral state.

The never-blooming buds of cauliflowers accumulate along infinite spirals welcoming smaller buds with the same geometry and producing conical structures typical of Roman broccoli.

Counting the spirals of the romanesco broccoli, the researchers noted that the values tend to be typical of the Fibonacci sequence, where the next number in the sequence is the sum of the two previous numbers. The typical cauliflower has five spirals that grow clockwise and eight counterclockwise, for example.

The process is triggered at the beginning of the plant's development and is due to the action of four genes that form a complex "gene network". In this network, the expression of the four genes is constantly changed so that some are turned on or off at specific times.

A complex and extraordinary mechanism that produces aincredible beauty.

Reference source: Science

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