A combinatorial model of phyllotaxis perturbations in [i]Arabidopsis thaliana[/i]

Phyllotaxis is the geometric arrangement of organs in plants, and is known to be highly regular. However, experimental data (from [i]Arabidopsis thaliana[/i]) show that this regularity is in fact subject to specific patterns of permutations. In this paper we introduce a model for these patterns, as well as algorithms designed to identify these patterns in noisy experimental data. These algorithms thus incorporate a denoising step which is based on Gaussian-like distributions for circular data for which a common dispersion parameter has been previously estimated. The application of the proposed algorithms allows us to confirm the plausibility of the proposed model, and to characterize the patterns observed in a specific mutant. The algorithms are available in the OpenAlea software platform for plant modelling [10].