Two essential functions in determining fruit quality are the transport and accumulation of water and dry matter to various fruit tissues. Since water and carbon are delivered to fruit tissues through a complex vasculature system, the internal fruit structure and pattern of vasculature may have a significant impact on their distribution within the fruit. The aim of this work was to provide methods for generating fruit structure that can be integrated with models of fruit function and used to investigate such effects. To this end, we developed a modelling pipeline in the OpenAlea platform that involves two steps: (1) generating a 3D volumetric mesh representation of the entire fruit, and (2) generating a complex network of vasculature that is embedded within this mesh. To create the 3D volumetric mesh, we used reconstruction algorithms from the 3D mesh generation package of the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library. To generate the pattern of vasculature within this volumetric mesh, we used an algorithmic approach from PlantScan3D software that was designed to reconstruct tree architecture from laser scanner data. We have applied our modelling pipeline to generate the internal and external geometry of a cherry tomato fruit using Magnetic Resonance Imaging data as input. These kinds of applications of our pipeline demonstrate its ability to create species-specific models of fruit structure with relatively low effort. In another work, the volumetric meshes will be combined with models of function to form integrative computational fruit models, which will help to investigate the effects of fruit structure on quality.
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