Developmental stability in plants: Symmetries,stress and epigenesis

Plant developmental stability has received little attention in the past three or four decades. Here we review differences in plant and animal development, and discuss the advantages of using plants as experimental subjects in exploring developmental stability. We argue that any type of developmental invariant may be used to assess developmental stability and review the use of fluctuating asymmetry in studies of plant developmental stability. We also examine the use of deviations from translatory, radial, and self-symmetry as measures of developmental instability. The role of nonlinear dynamics and epigenesis in the production of the phenotype is also discussed.