CSIRO Publishing Books Journals About Us Shopping Cart You are here: Journals > Functional Plant Biology   
Functional Plant Biology
  Plant Function & Evolutionary Biology
 
Search
 
 
  Advanced Search
   

Journal Home
About the Journal
Editorial Board
Contacts
Content
Online Early
Current Issue
Just Accepted
All Issues
Special Issues
Research Fronts
Reviews
Evolutionary Reviews
Sample Issue
For Authors
General Information
Notice to Authors
Submit Article
Open Access
For Referees
General Information
Review Article
Annual Referee Index
Referee Guidelines
For Subscribers
Subscription Prices
Customer Service
Print Publication Dates

 Early Alert
Subscribe to our email Early Alert or RSS feeds for the latest journal papers.

 Connect with us
facebook   youtube

 PrometheusWiki
PrometheusWiki
Protocols in ecological and environmental plant physiology

 

Article << Previous     |     Next >>   Contents Vol 36(7)

A ‘simplest’ steady-state Munch-like model of phloem translocation, with source and pathway and sink

William F. Pickard A B, Barbara Abraham-Shrauner A

A Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Washington University, St Louis, MO 63130, USA.
B Corresponding author. Email: wfp@ese.wustl.edu
 
PDF (657 KB) $25
 Supplementary Material
 Export Citation
 Print
  


Abstract

In the 80 years since its introduction by Münch, the pressure-driven mass-flow model of phloem translocation has become hegemonic, and has been mathematically modelled in many different fashions but not, to our knowledge, by one that incorporated the equations of hydrodynamics with those of osmosis and slice-source and slice-sink boundary conditions to yield a system that admits of an analytical steady-state solution for the sap velocity in a single sieve tube. To overcome this situation, we drastically simplified the problem by: (i) justifying a low Peclet number idealisation in which transverse variations could be neglected; (ii) justifying a low viscosity idealisation in which axial pressure drops could be neglected; and (iii) assuming a sink of strength sufficient to lower the photosynthate concentration at the extreme distal end of the sieve tube to levels at which it became unimportant. The resulting ordinary nonlinear second-order differential equation in sap velocity and axial position was of a generalised Liénard form with a single forcing parameter; and this is reason enough for the lack of a known analytic solution. However, since the forcing parameter was very large, it was possible to deduce approximate second-order solutions for behavior in the source, sink and transport regions: the sap velocity is zero at the slice-source, climbs with exponential rapidity to a plateau, maintains this plateau over most of the sieve tube, and then drops with exponential rapidity to zero at the slice-sink.

Keywords: biological fluid mechanics, Liénard equation, Münch mechanism, osmosis, phloem transport.


   
Subscriber Login
Username:
Password:  

    


 
Top  Email this page
 
Legal & Privacy | Contact Us | Help

CSIRO

© CSIRO 1996-2012