Plant Tracer: An App to quantify
Plant Movement
PI: Eric D. Brenner, Ph.D (Pace)
Micky Lopez (Pace)
Co-PI Yao Wang (NYU - Tandon)
Jiazhen Zhang & Yixiang Mao
Co-PI Jan Plass (NYU - Steinhardt)
Keisha Milsom
• Plants are constantly on the move with shoots
and roots searching for light, water, nutrients
and interacting with their neighbors. The
molecular underpinnings of this dynamism is
poorly understood.
• We are developing, Plant Tracer, an App that
enables students and researchers to quantify
plant movement using their smart phone or
tablets.
Plant Tracer: http://planttracer.com
• We are using Plant Tracer to detect mutants in
Arabidopsis thaliana (pictured above) that are
impaired in Circumnutation (periodic swaying)
and gravitropism (movement against gravity) to
identify the genes that control these processes.
• We are distributing Plant Tracer to our partner
universities in a crowd sourced effort to both
expand this mutant screen and interest students
in plant biology as a way of alleviating the
widespread problem of "Plant Blindness".
