CABDyN Project Profiles
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Mark Fricker University Lecturer in Plant Science and Tutorial Fellow Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford Academic Director, Pembroke College, University of Oxford |
Mark Fricker’s research area is imaging signalling and transport in intact plant and fungal systems operating in their correct tissue context. The interest in complexity has arisen in two areas. First, in trying to understand the network of interactions that underpin stomatal responses, one of the archetypal plant signalling system. Second, in mapping the fluxes of nutrients and control over their distribution in the physical network of foraging fungal mycelia. In the latter case, we have developed a new technique to continuously image transport of radiolabelled compounds using photon counting scintillation imaging. This provides time-lapse images of nutrient fluxes and has revealed rapid, pulsatile movements that may be organised in distinct domains within the network or even switch between different transport routes. The fungal mycelium provides a unique opportunity to study network architecture and how it develops in response to varying stimuli as the entire system is visible. There is also a long history of development of algorithms simulating branching systems based on mycelial systems. The new imaging and analysis techniques developed provide an opportunity to assess the functional transport capabilities of the network rather than just its topology. Already results suggest resources and information flows are concentrated in a sub-set of the total available morphological network. The close convergence of physical and functional simulations with experimental data suggest that this system may be ideally suited as a model system to extract critical features that underpin robust biological networks. Further
details can be found at his
homepage. |
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