Plants are sun worshippers and shade-avoidant. As soon as a leaf ‘sees’ shade, it either points its tip up, has the petiole grow further towards the light, or does a bit of both. We teamed up with  researchers from Wageningen to decipher how plants coordinate between light detection (“eye) and response of the plant itself, which involves surprising insights. Our joint results were published in the scientific journal PNAS on 26 June with our PhD students Chrysa Pantazopoulou and Franca Bongers as lead authors.

Read the full UU news story here
The paper can be found on the PNAS website

3D Computational Arabidopsis model                             Local light quality manipulation