Of Cells, Strands, and Networks: Auxin and the Patterned Formation of the Vascular System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout plant development, vascular cells continually form from within a population of seemingly equivalent cells. Vascular cells connect end to end to form continuous strands, and vascular strands connect at both or either end to form networks of exquisite complexity and mesmerizing beauty. Here we argue that experimental evidence gained over the past few decades implicates the plant hormone auxin-its production, transport, perception, and response-in all the steps that lead to the patterned formation of the plant vascular system, from the formation of vascular cells to their connection into vascular networks. We emphasize the organizing principles of the cell- and tissue-patterning process, rather than its molecular subtleties. In the picture that emerges, cells compete for an auxin-dependent, cell-polarizing signal; positive feedback between cell polarization and cell-to-cell movement of the polarizing signal leads to gradual selection of cell files; and selected cell files differentiate into vascular strands that drain the polarizing signal from the neighboring cells. Although the logic of the patterning process has become increasingly clear, the molecular details remain blurry; the future challenge will be to bring them into razor-sharp focus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".