Fractalize Me

The genes that cause Romanesco, a kind of cauliflower, to grow in a fractal pattern have been identified. Researchers were subsequently able to manipulate one of those genes and get it to function inside another plant—thale cress—producing fractal blooms.

The language used to describe this is interesting in its own right—a vocabulary of memory, transience, perturbation, and abandoned flowering.

In the words of the researchers’ abstract, “we found that curd self-similarity arises because the meristems fail to form flowers but keep the ‘memory’ of their transient passage in a floral state. Additional mutations affecting meristem growth can induce the production of conical structures reminiscent of the conspicuous fractal Romanesco shape. This study reveals how fractal-like forms may emerge from the combination of key, defined perturbations of floral developmental programs and growth dynamics.”

It’s the fact that this gene appears to function in other plants, though, that is blowing my mind. Give this technique another ten or twenty years, and the resulting experiments—and the subsequent landscapes—seem endless, from gardens of infinitely self-similar roses and orchids to forests populated by bubbling forms of fractal pines, roiling oaks, and ivies.

Until, of course, the gene inevitably escapes, going mobile, infecting insects and animals, producing confused anatomies in fractal landscapes, like minor creatures in a Jeff VanderMeer novel, before breaching the human genome, and oracular multicephalous children are born, their bodies transitioning through monstrosities of self-reminiscence and new limbs, mythological, infinitely incomplete, cursed with endless becoming.

In any case, read more over at ScienceNews, and check out the actual paper at Science.