Reciprocal insights into adaptation from agricultural and evolutionary studies in tomato

Although traditionally separated by different aims and methodologies, research on agricultural and evolutionary problems shares a common goal of understanding the mechanisms underlying functionally important traits. As such, research in both fields offers potential complementary and reciprocal insights. Here, we discuss adaptive stress responses (specifically to water stress) as an example of potentially fruitful research reciprocity, where agricultural research has clearly produced advances that could benefit evolutionary studies, while evolutionary studies offer approaches and insights underexplored in crop studies. We focus on research on Solanum species that include the domesticated tomato and its wild relatives. Integrated approaches to understanding ecological adaptation are particularly attractive in tomato and its wild relatives: many presumptively adaptive phenotypic differences characterize wild species, and the physiological and mechanistic basis of many relevant traits and environmental responses has already been examined in the context of cultivated tomato and some wild species. We highlight four specific instances where these reciprocal insights can be combined to better address questions that are fundamental both to agriculture and evolution

Deformation

In the continuous model of a solid object, which is ideally considered composed of such material points that each one of them is surrounded by a dense neighbourhood fully occupied by other points, the deformation is a variation carried out by a transformation, which does not preserve isometry. Deformations differ from displacements caused by rigid motions. For a closed boundary curve in the three-dimensional space, Plateau wondered what surfaces would minimize the potential surface energy. Deformation was held to underlie the evolution of biological forms, described by the “Cartesian transformations”, or the interpolation function of landmarks covariation over a thin-plate spline, the perception of depth, plastic arts, and art expression

An Unlikely Rome. Towards Performative Geometry

Despite the worldwide popularization of computer-assisted drawing pro-grams in all their variants, the Representation Systems used to develop pro-jects in Architecture have changed very little or nothing. Based on Descrip-tive Geometry for 200 years, in practice there is no renewal of space con-ceiving nor in the way objects are organized and distributed in relation to it. These systems ignore by default all the dynamic, immaterial, sensitive, ran-dom, ephemeral and changing components of the architectural project. An Unlikely Rome reveals, together with the Intersemiotic Translations and Drawings by Machines, a certain gap in Representation, which cannot be saved through the use of CAD based programs. This work confronts us with the complexity of the world on the one hand, and with the capacity of our minds to make decisions in the field of abduc-tion on the other. The goal of this work is to innovate in the Generation of Architectural Space through a process that involves changes in Representa-tion as well as in the generative processes in Architecture. This means treat-ing each difference or alteration as unique without falling into generaliza-tions or simplifications. Representation and Geometry are, overall, defined by what they hide. Let's search, though. An Unlikely Rome starts from a Non-Representation of the city of Rome, hidden behind its own Representation. The reconnection of the nodes through an abductive process provides creative, not programma-ble by computer, systematic, complex new answers