Virtual models provide real knowledge in the grass family
Monday, November 26, 2018 - 02:50
in Biology & Nature
The structures of flowers and other plant parts represent a rich and complex source of botanical information with great potential to answer a variety of taxonomic, evolutionary, and ecological questions. As computational approaches become ever more central to biological research, there is a pressing need to translate this information into tractable digital data for analysis. In research presented in a recent issue of Applications in Plant Sciences , Phillip Klahs and colleagues refined a method for creating high-quality, three-dimensional (3-D) digital representations of plant structures. They demonstrated the effectiveness of this technique by creating models of the flowers of three species in the grass family, Poaceae.