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Botanical ratchets

DSpace at IIT Bombay

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Title Botanical ratchets
 
Creator KULIC, IM
MANI, M
MOHRBACH, H
THAOKAR, R
MAHADEVAN, L
 
Subject awns
biological ratchets
transport
anisotropic surfaces
 
Description Ratcheting surfaces are a common motif in nature and appear in plant awns and grasses. They are known to proffer selective advantages for seed dispersion and burial. In two simple model experiments, we show that these anisotropically toothed surfaces naturally serve as motion rectifiers and generically move in a unidirectional manner, when subjected to temporally and spatially symmetric excitations of various origins. Using a combination of theory and experiment, we show that a linear relationship between awn length and ratchet efficiency holds under biologically relevant conditions. Grass awns can thus efficiently transform non-equilibrium environmental stresses from such sources as humidity variations into useful work and directed motion using their length as a fluctuation amplifier, yielding a selective advantage to these organelles in many plant species.
 
Publisher ROYAL SOC
 
Date 2011-08-27T11:36:34Z
2011-12-26T12:57:54Z
2011-12-27T05:46:00Z
2011-08-27T11:36:34Z
2011-12-26T12:57:54Z
2011-12-27T05:46:00Z
2009
 
Type Article
 
Identifier PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, 276(1665), 2243-2247
0962-8452
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2008.1685
http://dspace.library.iitb.ac.in/xmlui/handle/10054/11653
http://hdl.handle.net/10054/11653
 
Language en