Modeling the spongy mesophyll in plant leaves in three dimensions

Mature spongy mesophyll tissue in plant leaves is a complex porous network of highly non-spherical cells. The mesophyll tissue provides mechanical stability for the leaf, as well as allowing CO₂ to reach the chloroplasts for photosynthesis. Recent numerical simulations in two dimensions have shown that mesophyll tissue development in Arabidopsis thaliana can be modeled as a self-assembly process, where originally dense collections of cells grow into void space giving rise to non-spherical cells in porous networks that can maintain fixed positive external pressure. In this work, we perform structural characterizations of mature mesophyll tissues using micro-CT scans from multiple species. We focus on quantifying the porosity, cell shape, and density correlations in these tissue scans. In addition, we have developed a three-dimensional discrete element method simulation of mesophyll tissue and will compare the structural properties obtained from the simulations to those found in the micro-CT scans.