Speaker
Description
How would you build a plant? Where to place the cell walls? Does this even matter? Due to turgor pressure, plant cell walls must resist substantial tensile stresses, and if not managed properly, they can lead to structural damage or an ineffective use of resources. Since plant cells are rigidly connected to one another, to resist this mechanical stress, precise control over the placement of new cell walls is vital for developing effective and efficient tissues. To explore how plants manage these stresses, we use interdisciplinary methods, such as mechanical perturbations on live tissues using an extensometer and performing finite element inflation simulations of different deformations. For this purpose, we have built up and improved existing modelling software to simulate plant tissues in 3D efficiently and with multiple layers. Through such methods, we have investigated the consequences of cell shapes and tissue structure across multiple scales. Our findings offer new insights into the role of cell division patterns, the prevalence of 3-way junctions (staggered like bricks in a wall), and why plant cells take certain shapes like rectangles. This research advances our understanding of how plants sense and respond to mechanical forces in their environment.
