In higher plants, cell-to-cell polar auxin transport (PAT) of the phytohormone auxin, indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), generates maxima and minima that direct growth and development. Although IAA is present in all plant phyla, PAT has only been detected in land plants, the earliest being the Bryophytes. Charophyta, a group of freshwater green algae, are among the first multicellular algae with a land plant-like phenotype and are ancestors to land plants. IAA has been detected in members of Charophyta, but its developmental role and the occurrence of PAT are unknown. We show that naphthylphthalamic acid (NPA)-sensitive PAT occurs in internodal cells of Chara corallina. The relatively high velocity (at least 4–5 cm/h) of auxin transport through the giant (3–5 cm) Chara cells does not occur by simple diffusion and is not sensitive to a specific cytoplasmic streaming inhibitor. The results demonstrate that PAT evolved early in multicellular plant life. The giant Chara cells provide a unique new model system to study PAT, as Chara allows the combining of real-time measurements and mathematical modelling with molecular, developmental, cellular, and electrophysiological studies.

The polar transport of the plant hormone auxin has been the subject of many studies, several involving mathematical modelling. Unfortunately, most of these models have not been experimentally verified. Here we present experimental measurements of long-distance polar auxin transport (PAT) in segments of inflorescence stems of Arabidopsis thaliana together with a descriptive mathematical model that was developed from these data. It is based on a general advection–diffusion equation for auxin density, as suggested by the chemiosmotic theory, but is extended to incorporate both immobilization of auxin and exchange with the surrounding tissue of cells involved in PAT, in order to account for crucial observations. We found that development of the present model assisted effectively in the analysis of experimental observations. As an example, we discuss the analysis of a quadruple mutant for all four AUX1/LAX1–LAX3 influx carriers genes. We found a drastic change in the parameters governing the exchange of PAT channels with the surrounding tissue, whereas the velocity was still of the order of magnitude of the wild type. In addition, the steady-state flux of auxin through the PAT system of the mutant did not exhibit a saturable component, as we found for the wild type, suggesting that the import carriers are responsible for the saturable component in the wild type. In the accompanying Supplementary Data available at JXB online, we describe in more detail the data-driven development of the model, review and derive predictions from a mathematical model of the chemiosmotic theory, and explore relationships between parameters in our model and processes and parameters at the cellular level.

In this paper we prove well-posedness for a measure-valued continuity equation with solution-dependent velocity and flux boundary conditions, posed on a bounded one-dimensional domain. We generalize the results of an earlier paper [J. Differential Equations, 259 (2015), pp. 1068--1097] to settings where the dynamics are driven by interactions. In a forward-Euler-like approach, we construct a time-discretized version of the original problem and employ those results as a building block within each subinterval. A limit solution is obtained as the mesh size of the time discretization goes to zero. Moreover, the limit is independent of the specific way of partitioning the time interval $[0,T]$. This paper is partially based on results presented in Chapter 5 of [Evolution Equations for Systems Governed by Social Interactions, Ph.D. thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology, 2015], while a number of issues that were still open there are now resolved.

We consider Markov semigroups on the cone of positive finite measures on a complete separable metric space. Such a semigroup extends to a semigroup of linear operators on the vector space of measures that typically fails to be strongly continuous for the total variation norm. First we characterise when the restriction of a Markov semigroup to an invariant L¹-space is strongly continuous. Aided by this result we provide several characterisations of the subspace of strong continuity for the total variation norm. We prove that this subspace is a projection band in the Banach lattice of finite measures, and consequently obtain a direct sum decomposition.

For any regular Markov operator on the space of finite Borel measures on a Polish space we give a Yosida-type decomposition of the state space, which yields a parametrization of the ergodic probability measures associated with this operator in terms of particular subsets of the state space. We use this parametrization to prove an integral decomposition of every invariant probability measure in terms of the ergodic probability measures and give an ergodic decomposition of the state space. This extends results by Yosida [Functional Analysis. Springer, Berlin, 1980, Ch. XIII.4], Hernández-Lerma and Lasserre [Ergodic theorems and ergodic decomposition for Markov chains. Acta Appl. Math.54 (1998), 99–119] and Zaharopol [An ergodic decomposition defined by transition probabilities. Acta Appl. Math.104 (2008), 47–81], who considered the setting of locally compact separable metric spaces. Our extension to Polish spaces solves an open problem posed by Zaharopol (loc. cit.) in a satisfactory manner.