RUI: Growth Equations for Sporangiophores of Phycomyces: Environmental and Sensory Responses

在过去的40年里，许多科学家对布氏藻霉的单细胞进行了研究。这些大型植物细胞可以生长到20厘米长，可以检测和响应许多不同的环境和感官刺激(如光、重力、机械拉伸和风)，并改变生长速度(这相对容易测量)。一些科学家希望这些研究能更好地了解环境和感觉刺激是如何由细胞处理的(感觉转导)，以及植物细胞如何调节其生长速度。本工作的目的是建立描述这些植物细胞生长速率的方程，以便对生长速率规律有一个更详细、更全面、更定量的了解。这些方程还可以提供一个框架，通过这个框架，发生在感觉转导中的生化事件可能与植物细胞生长速度的可测量变化有关。

The single cells of Phycomyces blakesleeanus have been studied by many scientists during the past four decades. These large plant cells, which can grow up to twenty centimeters in length, can detect and respond to many different environmental and sensory stimuli (such as light, gravity, mechanical stretching, and wind) with a change in growth rate (which is relatively easy to measure). Some scientists hope that these studies will provide a better understanding of how the environmental and sensory stimuli are processed by the cell (sensory transduction), and how the plant cell regulates its growth rate. The goal of the present work is to establish equations which describe the growth rate of these plant cells, so that a more detailed, comprehensive, and quantitative understanding of growth rate regulation is obtained. These equations may also provide the framework by which the biochemical events, which occur in sensory transduction, may be related to the measurable changes in the growth rate of the plant cell.