An obscure aquatic plant has helped to explain how plants avoid cracking up under the stresses and strains of growth.
An obscure aquatic plant has helped to explain how plants avoid cracking up under the stresses and strains of growth.
The finding, by researchers Dr. Robert Kelly-Bellow and Karen Lee in the group of Professor Enrico Coen at the John Innes Centre, started with a curious observation in a dwarf mutant of the carnivorous plant Utricularia gibba.
The stems of this floating plant are filled with air spaces, and this hollowness means that the vascular column inside the stem can buckle when under stress. This effect would not be apparent in most plants, which have solid stems.
The researchers saw that in a dwarf mutant the central column was wavy instead of straight. They hypothesized that this wobbly spine was caused by an internal conflict, a disparity between what was happening inside the plant stem and the epidermis or skin. Computational modeling by co-author Dr. Richard Kennaway showed this idea could account for what was observed.
The paper is published in the journal Science.
“We realized that in these types of dwarf, only the epidermis, the skin of the stem, wants to be short, the internal tissue still wants to be long hence the buckling effect,” explains Professor Enrico Coen of the John Innes Centre, an author of the study.
“This was a surprise—previously people had thought that dwarf varieties, which are very important in agriculture, would be dwarf because everything in the stem is affected to grow less, but in fact it’s just the skin in this case, creating a sort of straitjacket.
