  One of the key characteristics of multicellular organisms is the ability to
establish and maintain shapes, or morphologies, under a variety of physical and
chemical perturbations. A quantitative description of the underlying
morphological dynamics is a critical step to fully understand the
self-organising properties of multicellular systems. Although many powerful
mathematical tools have been developed to analyse stochastic dynamics, rarely
these are applied to experimental developmental biology. Here, we take root tip
regeneration in the plant model system Arabidopsis thaliana as an example of
robust morphogenesis in living tissue and present a novel approach to quantify
and model the relaxation of the system to its unperturbed morphology. By
generating and analysing time-lapse series of regenerating root tips captured
with confocal microscopy, we are able to extract and model the dynamics of key
morphological traits at cellular resolution. We present a linear stability
analysis of its Markovian dynamics, with the stationary state representing the
intact root in the space of morphological traits. We find that the resulting
eigenvalues can be classified into two groups, suggesting the co-existence of
two distinct temporal scales during the process of regeneration. We discuss the
possible biological implications of our specific results and suggest future
experiments to further probe the self-organising properties of living tissue.
