Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protecting coat known as the cell wall. It’s constructed of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We’ve got recognized what plant cells seem like with out their partitions, and we all know what they seem like when the partitions are absolutely assembled, however we’ve by no means seen the wall-building course of in motion. “We knew the start line and the ending level, however had no thought what occurs in between,” says Eric Lam, a plant biologist at Rutgers College. He’s a co-author of the research that caught wall-building plant cells in motion for the primary time. And as soon as we noticed how the cell wall constructing labored, it appeared nothing like how we drew that in biology handbooks.
Digicam-shy builders
Plant cells with out partitions, often known as protoplasts, are very fragile, and it has been troublesome to maintain them alive underneath a microscope for the a number of hours wanted for them to construct partitions. Plant cells are additionally very light-sensitive, and most microscopy strategies require pointing a powerful gentle supply at them to get good imagery.
Then there was the problem of monitoring their progress. “Cellulose shouldn’t be fluorescent, so you possibly can’t see it with conventional microscopy,” says Shishir Chundawat, a biologist at Rutgers. “That was one of many largest points prior to now.” The one approach you possibly can see it’s when you connect a fluorescent marker to it. Sadly, the markers usually used to label cellulose had been both certain to different compounds or had been poisonous to the plant cells. Given their fragility and lightweight sensitivity, the cells merely couldn’t survive very lengthy with poisonous markers as nicely.
