Stefano Mancuso LINV- DIPSA – University of Florence Title: Communication in plant root Abstract Somewhere between 400–1,000 million years ago, plants initiated a sessile lifestyle, taking advantage of the ubiquity of light as a source of energy as well as devising ways of compensating for body losses suffered because of browsing predators. Among the primary […]
Michaela Eder, Ingo Burgert, Matthew J. Harrington, John WC Dunlop, Peter Fratzl Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Department of Biomaterials, Potsdam, Germany Title: Design Principles of Plant Actuation Abstract Plants are generally sessile and they need special strategies in order to generate movements for seed or pollen dispersal, (wind) load compensation or climbing. […]
František Baluška IZMB, University of Bonn, Kirschallee 1, 53115 Bonn, Germany Title: Growing Roots and their Searching Behaviour Abstract Plant roots perform complex movements (tropisms) in order to navigate successfully in the soil. In order to provide plants with nutrition, they need to search for water- and nutrition-rich soil patches and avoid dangerous dry or […]
Guido Caldarelli INFM-CNR Centro SMC Department of Physics, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, Rome, Italy Title: Quantifying the taxonomic diversity in real species communities Abstract We analyze several florae (collections of plant species populating specific areas) in different geographic and climatic regions. For every list of species we produce a taxonomic classification tree and we […]
Paco Calvo Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain Title: Adaptive behavior and direct perception: ecological lessons from plant neurobiology Abstract With an eye to explaining how biological systems generalize, a panoply of strategies that rely upon the concepts of competence, cognition and misrepresentation is now available in the marketplace. The underlying assumption, on pain of falling […]
Camilla Pandolfi The European Space Agency, Noordwijk, The Netherlands Title: Seeds, dispersal and biomimicry Abstract Seeds provide the vital genetic link and dispersal agent between successive generations of plants. Without seed dispersal as a means of reproduction, many plants would quickly die out, and it is the last important step before the new offspring finally […]
A lot of people attended the workshop, held yesterday at the Accademia dei Georgofili. Here I will publish one after the other the abstracts of the talks. A selected number of contributions will be published soon on a special issue of the journal “Bioinspiration and Biomimetics”
Smart Solutions From The Plant Kingdom: beyond the animal models This is the title of the exciting workshop organized by Stefano Mancuso together with Barbara Mazzolai, from the Centre for Micro-BioRobotics of IIT@SSSA. The workshop will be held on October 24, 2011 at Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence (Italy) with the aims of: providing an […]
