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Spontaneous Movements in Plants Studied as a Random Walk Process
Author(s) -
Johnsson Anders
Publication year - 1966
Publication title -
physiologia plantarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.351
H-Index - 146
eISSN - 1399-3054
pISSN - 0031-9317
DOI - 10.1111/j.1399-3054.1966.tb07106.x
Subject(s) - clinostat , random walk , constant (computer programming) , process (computing) , mathematics , variance (accounting) , curvature , mathematical analysis , statistics , computer science , geometry , botany , biology , accounting , business , programming language , operating system
A theory to describe spontaneous curvatures performed by different plant materials on the clinostat is put forward. The movements are proposed to follow the assumptions of a random walk process (statistically randomly distributed movements) and thus to give curvatures following the equations E( α ) = 0 V( α ) = constant * time where α is the curvature from the starting direction, E( α ) is the expectation of α and V( α ) is the variance of α . These equations are experimentally shown to be valid for Lepidium roots and Helianthus hypocotyls. Results for roots reported in the literature are recalculated and are shown to support the theory.