Image-Based Quantitative Analysis of Epidermal Morphology in Wild Potato Leaves.

The epidermal leaf patterns of plants exhibit remarkable diversity in cell shapes, sizes, and arrangements, driven by environmental interactions that lead to significant adaptive changes even among closely related species. The Solanaceae family, known for its high diversity of adaptive epidermal structures, has traditionally been studied using qualitative phenotypic descriptions. To advance this, we developed a workflow combining multi-scale computer vision, image processing, and data analysis to extract digital descriptors for leaf epidermal cell morphology.