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Leaves found pressed between the pages of a 450-year-old Bible ... and the potential to increase plants' productivity: both present a challenge to Dr Chuck Price.

The key to identifying the old leaves and perhaps eventually increasing the world's food production can both be found in Assistant Professor Price's new software, which goes by the delightful name of LEAF GUI.

The Leaf Extraction and Analysis Framework Graphical User Interface is a breakthrough technology that helps plant biologists to identify and measure the geometry of thousands of veins in leaves in mere minutes, a process so time-consuming previously that it was simply not done.

A/Professor Price, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist who has recently joined the School of Plant Biology from Georgia Tech, where he developed the software, says he expects it will be taken up by researchers in other disciplines, including biotechnology.

In the meantime, LEAF GUI, released for academic use in January this year, is providing enormous time-saving help to plant biologists who are under pressure to breed plants that can respond to changing environments.

"A single leaf can have more than 100,000 individual veins, most of which are quite tiny," A/Professor Price said. "You can imagine the difficulty this presents in attempting to measure those veins by hand."

LEAF GUI can be used for plant phenotyping - characterising a plant's traits - to evaluate experimental treatments that influence vein form, and ultimately, affect plant productivity.

"The vein geometry has a tight relationship with photosynthesis, so that's one place to look if you're aiming at increasing plant and food production," he said.

A/Professor Price has made his software program freely available online for academic use (www.leafgui.org). "It's important to make it free because some of the people who might most need it may not be able to afford to pay for it. I'm thinking of the scientist in an underdeveloped country, operating on a shoestring budget, who needs the program to help him improve crop yields.

"I haven't yet explored the commercial potential but I guess we could charge commercial companies who want to use it."

He said he does not consider himself a computer programmer and created the software, during a post-doctoral position at Georgia Tech, because he wanted to use it. "I didn't realise at the time that other people would be so interested."

One of A/Professor Price's goals was to test current theories of biological vein formation, for example, whether leaf veins are fractals. (Fractals are patterns or networks that have been purported to explain the geometry and physiology of life.)

"I found that leaf veins have only some of the properties of fractals. I analysed more than four million individual veins in hundreds of leaves using the software to determine this.

I don't think anybody could have worked this out without LEAF GUI ," he said.

When the School of Plant Biology received a call from the Library's Susana Melo de Howard, a senior library officer in the Scholars' Centre, saying they had found some old leaves in a Bible, her query was passed straight to A/Professor Price.

"We would love to know how old these leaves are, what species they are and where they came from," said Ms Melo de Howard.

"They had been used to mark pages in a 1540 Bible, which a member of the public was recently perusing. It is extremely rare for anybody to ask for this book, but this man, who is (appropriately) a fisherman I understand, is doing some comparison work on Bibles."

The leaves will need to be carbon-dated, to determine how old they are, before A/Professor Price will use his program to try to identify them.

"I may be able to use the geometry of the leaf network to assign it to a species," he said. "Botanists usually use flowers to identify plants but I'm going to give it a crack."

Published in UWA News , 18 April 2011