How do flower petal cells change across a petal? (BioE80 Spr2015)

May 27, 2015 • 11:10 AM UTC

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Matthew

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I wanted to learn a bit more about flower petals. Specifically, I had a few questions about the cells of a flower petal: Does the shape of a flower petal cell change towards the edge? Why does the color of a flower petal change and get darker towards the edge? Are the cells different colors? To answer these questions, I plucked a flower outside of our classroom and made a slide out of it.

Flower slide Next, using the Foldscope we made in class, I took a closer look at the cells of the flower petals.

The edge of the petal did appear darker under the microscope. Interestingly, the color doesn’t look like it slowly gets darker across the petal, but very suddenly changes at one point. This lead me to believe that the actual cells are not the reason the color of a flower petal changes near its edges, but that the cells coil up near the edges and fold over themselves, appearing as a straight line under the microscope. As a result, there are more cells stacked on top of each other near the edge of a flower petal, making the cells appear darker.

Spread out petal
Looking at a spread out flower petal, I could see that the color barely changes towards the edge, and the cells all look the same. Thus, the cells of a flower petal don’t change towards the edge, they just coil up.
Explorer: Sam Premutico

How do flower petal cells change across a petal? (BioE80 Spr2015)

Matthew

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