UC Riverside

In the process of pollination, a pollen tube grows from a pollen grain that has fallen on the stigma of a flower. This tube grows towards the ovary of the flower where it will deliver male reproductive material. Knowledge of the dynamics of pollen tube growth will provide a basis for understanding more complex cells that exhibit similar growth behavior. Current pollen tube growth models are a collection of differential equations that represent the level of understanding that biologists have concerning apical growth. Due to their complex nature, these models are not used to verify observed behavior in living cells as seen under a microscope. We present a model that can be used to describe the behavior of growing pollen tube cells in actual experiments. We propose biologically relevant functions based on knowledge of the growth process to explain the dynamics of model parameters. Our model uses an affine transformation to propagate the tip of the cell and statistical parameter estimation to measure necessary parameters during growth. Using experimental videos of pollen tube growth, we show that our model can adapt to various growth scenarios while extracting growth parameters from the videos.