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JXB Advance Access originally published online on August 14, 2009
Journal of Experimental Botany 2009 60(14):4175-4187; doi:10.1093/jxb/erp251
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press [on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology]. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

RESEARCH PAPER

Onion epidermis as a new model to study the control of growth anisotropy in higher plants

Dmitry Suslov *, Jean-Pierre Verbelen and Kris Vissenberg{dagger}

Laboratory of Plant Growth and Development, Biology Department, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium

{dagger} To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kris.vissenberg{at}ua.ac.be

To elucidate the role of cellulose microfibrils in the control of growth anisotropy, a link between their net orientation, in vitro cell wall extensibility, and anisotropic cell expansion was studied during development of the adaxial epidermis of onion (Allium cepa) bulb scales using polarization confocal microscopy, creep tests, and light microscopy. During growth the net cellulose alignment across the whole thickness of the outer epidermal wall changed from transverse through random to longitudinal and back to transverse relative to the bulb axis. Cell wall extension in vitro was always higher transverse than parallel to the net cellulose alignment. The direction of growth anisotropy was perpendicular to the net microfibril orientation and changed during development from longitudinal to transverse to the bulb axis. The correlation between the degree of growth anisotropy and the net cellulose alignment was poor. Thus the net cellulose microfibril orientation across the whole thickness of the outer periclinal epidermis wall defines the direction but not the degree of growth anisotropy. Strips isolated from the epidermis in the directions perpendicular and transverse to a net cellulose orientation can be used as an extensiometric model to prove a protein involvement in the control of growth anisotropy.

Key words: Cellulose orientation, cell wall, extensiometry, growth anisotropy, onion

* Present address: Saint-Petersburg State University, Faculty of Biology and Soil Science, Department of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry, Universitetskaya emb. 7/9, Saint-Petersburg 199034, Russia.

Received 29 May 2009; Revised 24 July 2009 Accepted 29 July 2009


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