Trichome: unusual plant hair

Mar 19, 2015 • 10:58 PM UTC

China Basin, San Francisco, CA 94107, USA

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Microorganisms

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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Did you kno ; just like animals, plants also have hairs. That as quiet a surprise when I first learned about the same. More surprising though is the diversity of form and function found in plant hair.
To explore this idea; I just took one single flower and searched for a number of hair geometry on a single petal. To my absolute surprise; I was able to count up to 6 different kind of plant hair on a single flower petal. Clearly they all have function that ties very closely to what the form is – but I don’t know what.. The structures were so mesmerizing; I documented them all here. Take a look at the collections.

To give you a context of where I got them from; I started with a flower growing on the wall next door to my house.

When you break open the flower; I could see some fuzzy strictures on the inside of the flower. I got very curious thinking about the function of such precise structure.

This was an exciting moment since I was able to discover a vast variety of “trichome” structures. I still can not get over the fact that such a macro structural variation exist; and clearly I don’t know any of the functional role.