Quantifying the Mechanics of Plant Cell Wall Growth

The plant cell wall is a critically vital component of each plant that directly affects its ability to survive, withstand harsh environmental conditions, and grow and evolve. The cell wall is consistently an area of interest in many industries including biofuels, textiles and food. The ability to create an integrated experimental and computational framework that reveals growth in pavement cells and how they behave during this growth process gives important information that that can dictate tissue and organ morphology. To be able to create this framework, dynamic validation at early stages of growth requires unique techniques that allow data to be taken in such a way to quantify growth of cell walls properly at the microscale level. Addressing the concerns of studying such a difficult material was an initial goal to this project followed by searching for the direct causes of cellular expansion and how a physical study of live plants can be successfully integrated with current three dimensional modeling software. The experimental methods developed throughout this study laid a framework that will allow continued study in this field to be broadened as well as collected important data on cellular expansion through microscopy and computer data processing that begins to quantify the growth process in a way that will be impactful to a wide array of industries