黑料吃瓜资源

Look up at the clouds. What do you see? A sailboat? A seahorse? Your great-aunt Rosemary? As humans, we鈥檙e prone to seeing patterns where they don鈥檛 actually exist. This behavior is so common there鈥檚 a name for it: apophenia. But sometimes, those patterns really do exist. 黑料吃瓜资源 Associate Professor Saket Navlakha specializes in finding them.

Voronoi diagrams are geometric patterns used to divide space into regions. Each region contains a given central point. For example, when dividing a town into school districts (regions), a Voronoi diagram guarantees that all students living within a district are closer to that district鈥檚 school (central point) than to any other school. 鈥淰oronoi diagrams have been used for centuries in a variety of applications ranging from city planning to network design,鈥� Navlakha says.

Voronoi-like patterns are common in nature鈥攇iraffe stripes, for example. However, the keyword there is 鈥渓ike.鈥� The difference between textbook Voronoi patterns and what we see in nature is that the latter usually lacks visible 鈥渟chools.鈥� Now, Navlakha and former graduate student Cici Zheng have found an exception in Pilea peperomioides, the Chinese money plant.

Chinese money plants are perennials native to China鈥檚 Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. You may have received one as a housewarming gift from great-aunt Rosemary. Its round, flat leaves feature prominent pores called hydathodes, surrounded by looping reticulate veins that transport water and nutrients to and from the leaf. By mapping Chinese money plants鈥� pores and veins, Navlakha, Zheng, and CSHL Partners for the Future program participant Elijah Blum discovered a naturally occurring Voronoi pattern.

The team then turned to world-renowned scientist Przemys艂aw Prusinkiewicz, who has studied vein patterning for decades. Together, they worked out the 鈥渘atural algorithm鈥� used to form looping veins around central pores in Chinese money plants鈥� leaves.

鈥淛ust as humans have to solve problems to survive, the same goes for other organisms,鈥� says Zheng, now a postdoc at the Allen Institute. 鈥淏ut unlike humans, plants cannot explicitly measure distances! Instead, they rely on local biological interactions to achieve the same Voronoi solution.鈥�

鈥淲e think of these algorithms in nature as an explanation for how organisms will behave and as a way to try to make sense of the world,鈥� Navlakha says. 鈥淭his example is a nice merger of classical geometry, modern plant biology, and computer science.鈥�

鈥淚t鈥檚 remarkable how mathematical yet another aspect of plant form and patterning turns out to be,鈥� Prusinkiewicz adds. 鈥淔or decades, the question of how reticulate veins form has remained open, and finally we have a plausible answer鈥� in Chinese money plants鈥� Voronoi patterns.

Navlakha and Zheng hope exploring this phenomenon can help tell us how plants work out complex problems in nature. Understanding that may provide a new framework for making sense of the math underlying evolution, development, and life itself.

Written by: Nick Wurm, Communications Specialist | [email protected] | 516-367-5940

Funding

CSHL School of Biological Sciences William R. Miller Fellowship, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Science Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, CSHL Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Citation

Zheng, C.X.,听et al., 鈥淩eticulate leaf venation in听笔颈濒别补听辫别辫别谤辞尘颈辞颈诲别蝉听is a Voronoi diagram鈥�,听Nature Communications, May 12, 2026. DOI:

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Core Facilites

鈥淭丑别 Microscopy Core Facility provides training, consultation, experimental design and technical assistance to investigators at CSHL in widefield, spinning disk laser scanning or point laser scanning confocal fluorescence microscopy, and super-resolution microscopy. In addition, the Microscopy Shared Resource provides customized state-of-the-art optical imaging and quantitative image analysis applications to support a wide range of scientific endeavors.鈥� 鈥� Director Erika Wee, Ph.D.