Abstract
Organs form with remarkably consistent sizes and shapes during development, whereas a high variability in growth is observed at the cell level. Given this contrast, it is unclear how such consistency in organ scale can emerge from cellular behavior. Here, we examine an intermediate scale, the growth of clones of cells in Arabidopsis sepals. Each clone consists of the progeny of a single progenitor cell. At early stages, we find that clones derived from a small progenitor cell grow faster than those derived from a large progenitor cell. This results in a reduction in clone size variability, a phenomenon we refer to as size uniformization. By contrast, at later stages of clone growth, clones change their growth pattern to enhance size variability, when clones derived from larger progenitor cells grow faster than those derived from smaller progenitor cells. Finally, we find that, at early stages, fast growing clones exhibit greater cell growth heterogeneity. Thus, cellular variability in growth might contribute to a decrease in the variability of clones throughout the sepal.
Highlights
As in most living multicellular organisms, plant organs are reproducible; organs have their own characteristic sizes and shapes, making them landmarks for species identification in botany
Clones switch growth patterns from size uniformization to size variability enhancement First, we investigated the relationship between the initial sizes of the clones and their growth rates in developing Arabidopsis sepals
The growth of individual cells will be discussed in the section headed ‘Individual cell growth heterogeneity is positively correlated with the growth of clones at each time step’
Summary
As in most living multicellular organisms, plant organs are reproducible; organs have their own characteristic sizes and shapes, making them landmarks for species identification in botany. Live imaging demonstrates that in many cases, cell sizes, growth rates and directions exhibit considerable variability. The timing and geometry of cell division is variable in organs with stereotypical shapes (Roeder et al, 2010; Besson and Dumais, 2011). These results raise the question of the contributions of such cellular noise and variability to organ size/shape consistency (Meyer and Roeder, 2014; Hong et al, 2016)
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