Project
Mechanical control of plant tissue engineering
Plants have a unique ability to grow entire organisms from a single cell. A very useful tool for plant breeders, but incredibly difficult to achieve in a lab. That is because each plant requires a very specific combination of forces and mechanical constraints for successful development. In this project, we are figuring out what those mechanical requirements are and how we can apply and exploit them to engineer plant tissues in a petri dish.
Background
The inspiration for this project dates back to the late 19th century, when Charles Darwin described a plant’s ability to navigate its roots around hard objects in the soil, and to 2006, when researchers published their findings on the mammalian stem cell’s ability to sense and respond to the stiffness of its surroundings. The latter turned out to be a groundbreaking discovery, because researchers were now able to manipulate the stiffness (or mechanical environment) of the surroundings, which induced changes in the mammalian cell’s identity. This is now known as tissue engineering and forms the basis of innovative techniques such as organoid culture or lab-grown meat.
Although we have all the reason to think that plant cells should have a similar or even stronger mechanosensitive ability, for instance owing to Darwin’s observations, but also because plant cells are more frequently exposed to much more extreme mechanical conditions (inside plant tissues pressures similar to those in a champagne bottle are reached), we are still not able to engineer plant tissues using mechanical signals. This has two underlying causes. Firstly, we are not exactly sure how plants ‘feel’ their environment and which mechanical environment they ‘like’, and secondly, even if we knew, we don’t have the right tools to provide the plants with their ‘preferred’ mechanical environment.
In this project, we are looking for answers on how plants perceive mechanical signals from their environment, while simultaneously developing tools to subject them to controlled mechanical signals.
Project description
This multidisciplinary project consists of a few phases, each phase branching out to one of the different disciplines in the mechanobiology toolbox.
In the initial phase, we will work on the development of tools to apply designed mechanical signals to plant cells. This phase involves some chemical synthesis of hydrogels, rheological characterization, and design and engineering work. Simultaneously, we will work on the optimization of protoplast regeneration, since this will be our tissue of interest.
In the second phase, we will use our tools to study how our protoplasts react to designed mechanical signals. Interesting candidates will be subjected to detailed biochemical analysis. This phase aims at finding the optimal mechanical conditions for tissue culture.
We will use our tools and knowledge in the third phase of the project, where we will transition from model species to commercially relevant plants such as crops or ornamental plants.