Sexual reproduction is a critical biological process, where two organisms physically fuse their gametes to produce a new, genetically unique individual. The mechanical constrains for two cells to meet pose obvious physical limitations, which are even more apparent in land plants, which often accomplish sexual reproduction even when miles apart. These limitations are even more apparent in those plants that use wind as the primary means for dispersal, a mechanism present even in flowering plants where animal dispersal is otherwise very common. Morphological studies have highlighted that whilst pollen from wind pollinated species is smoother than animal dispersed one, wind dispersed spore during early land plant history show complex, ornamented surfaces. This observation remains paradoxical mainly due to the lack of sophisticated computational frameworks to study and understand pollen aerodynamics. We developed one such framework to study how ornaments impact aerodynamic properties in the range where flow changes from laminar to turbulent regimes. Our preliminary results seem to have solved this paradox, emphasising that the beneficial effect of ornaments is proportional to particle size. 

Dr. Marco D'Ario was born in Rome, Italy, but moved to England when he was 23. He lived in England for more than ten years, where he did his college studies and graduated in Biotechnology at the University of Manchester. He did his Ph.D. at the John Innes Centre in cell and developmental biology, where his team discovered the mechanism for cell size regulation in the plant meristem. After my Ph.D., fascinated by paleobotany, he obtained the Gatsby Grant for Exceptional Researcher to develop software for the three-dimensional reconstruction and biomechanical analysis of fossilized sporangia tissue. He is now at Stanford as an HFSP fellow, hoping to merge my interest in cell size, paleobotany, and physics to understand the mechanisms of plant evolution.