This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Unlike an animal cell, a plant cell can't crawl or migrate. It's locked inside a rigid wall, cemented to its neighbors for life.
A cell born at the center of a young fruit will still be there when that fruit ripens. That constraint has a direct consequence. When two tissues are fused together but programmed to grow at different speeds, neither can simply pull away, and something has to give.
The faster tissue puts the slower one under tension; the slower one, in turn, holds the faster one back. A study by scientists at Université de Montréal shows that this tug-of-war, far from being a mere inconvenience, is one of the tools the plant uses to build its fruit. Doctoral student Binghan Wang led the project, supervised by Daniel Kierzkowski, a professor in UdeM's Department of Biological Sciences and a researcher at the Institute for Research in Plant Biology (IRBV).
The study combines time-lapse imaging, microsurgery, genetics and a computer model developed with Richard Smith of the John Innes Center in the U.K. The study is published in the journal Current Biology. The team studied Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, a small plant biologists have used as a reference model for decades.
It has a short life cycle, a fully sequenced and well-understood genome, and a broad genetic toolkit that makes it easy to create mutants to test hypotheses. Discoveries in thale cress usually shed light on mechanisms shared by many other plants, such as those in the Brassicaceae family, which includes canola, cabbage, broccoli and others. The researchers focused on the gynoecium, the flower's female reproductive organ.
This structure becomes the fruit once it is fertilized and is where ovules (which become seeds) form. The gynoecium is made of two very different tissues, fused together: That slowness is no accident: The replum is connected to the meristem, a small reservoir of actively dividing cells that produces the ovules. In every plant, meristems grow slowly, a property considered essential to building organs reliably.
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