MEROZ LAB

PHYSICS OF PLANT COMPUTATIONAL
& BEHAVIORAL PROCESSES

WHAT WE'RE INTO

Plants are stationary, living, information-processing organisms which use physical laws and biological mechanisms to alter their shapes and dynamically respond to their ever-changing environments. We aim to understand how plants control and compute as a growing distributed system, performing complex navigational tasks, how they carry out mechanical work to drive the evolving geometry, and how complex bio-chemical networks control these systems, enabling to encode spatial and temporal information. We adopt a statistical physics approach, inferring underlying microscopic processes from observed macroscopic responses, and carry out experiments in house.

OUR TOOLBOX

EXPERIMENTS

We observe complex macroscopic responses of plants to diverse stimuli

STATISTICAL PHYSICS

We infer microscopic stochastic processes from macroscopic responses

MATHEMATICAL MODELING

We use minimal modeling and numerical simulations to study observations

RESEARCH AT A GLANCE

"Ask not what physics can do for biology - ask what biology can do for physics" // Ulam

Mechanics of growth-driven penetration of roots In collaboration with Ayelet Lesman (TAU) we combined experimental measurements together with numerical simulations, finding that the growth-driven penetration strategy of plant roots is mechanically more efficient than pushing. * Koren et al. (2024) Plant, Cell & Environment	Self organization of plants In collaboration with Orit Peleg (U. of Colorado Boulder), we found that circumnutations, inherent oscillatory plant movements, provide random perturbations required for optimal self-organization mediated by mutual shading. This suggests functional noise. * Nguyen et al. (2024) PRX	Active tropisms and passive mechanics In collaboration with M. Gazzola, we study how plants combine active gravitropic responses together with passive mechanics, when interacting with their environment. As a case study, we investigate waving, coiling and skewing observed in Arabidopsis roots. * Porat et al. (2023) PNAS
Plant arithmetics We extract the form of the memory function underpinning temporal integration in plant gravitropic responses of wheat. Based on the form of this memory, we find that plants sum and subtract stimuli over time. * Riviere et al. (2023) PNAS	Temporal integration in plants Plants do not respond instantaneously but rather to an integrated history of stimuli. We adopt Response Theory to develop a model which describes these classes of experiments. * Meroz et al. (2019) R. Soc. Interface	Plant circumnutations Circumnutations are an oscillatory movement that plants display during their development. We show that this results from the alignment of the orientation of the curvature of the plant with the direction of maximal differential growth. * Bastien and Meroz (2016) PLoS Comput Biol
3D model for growth dynamics A general 3D model for rod-like organs, allowing to simulate responses to external stimuli (such as sunlight and gravity), a point stimulus (a point light source), and a line stimulus which emulates twining of a climbing plant around a support. We also simulate circumnutations, as well as the superposition of internal and external cues. * Porat et al. (2020) Front. Robotics