Cells in the lateral root of Arabidopsis thaliana. Image credit: Charlotte Kirchhelle (CC BY 4.0)
A fundamental challenge in biology is to understand how plants, animals and other multicellular organisms make organs of various shapes and sizes. Plant cells are surrounded by rigid walls that fix them into their position relative to the surrounding cells. Therefore, neighbouring cells have to precisely coordinate how fast and in which directions they grow to form organs. In roots, for example, cells need to primarily grow in a longitudinal direction (along the length of the root), rather than radially, in order for the root to maintain its cylinder shape.
Plant cell walls are made of fibres known as cellulose microfibrils, which are embedded within a matrix of other cell wall material. These fibres are much stiffer than the cell wall matrix, and their orientation controls in which direction a cell will grow. When microfibrils are lying parallel to each other, they limit cell growth in the direction they are orientated, causing cells to grow at right angles to the microfibrils. However, the way microfibrils are angled does not always fully expain the direction in which a cell will grow: for example, young cells in lateral roots (roots that branch out from the primary root) mainly grow in a longitudinal direction although their microfibrils are randomly arranged. This suggests other mechanisms are also involved in controlling in which direction a cell will grow.
In order to grow, cells transport cell wall material and other cargo to the cell surface through different transport routes. A protein known as RAB-A5c controls a pathway directed to the edges of cells where two faces meet. It is not clear what exactly is transported in this edge-directed pathway, but root cells no longer grow in a longitudinal direction when RAB-A5c is inhibited. Previous studies have found that the edges of cells help to arrange cellulose microfibrils in the cell wall, but it is not clear whether RAB-A5c controls cell growth through this or another process. To address this question, Kirchhelle et al. used several different approaches to study the role RAB-A5c plays in how lateral roots grow in the small weed Arabidopsis thaliana.
The experiments found that RAB-A5c controlled which direction cells in the lateral roots grew independently of cellulose microfibril orientation. Inhibiting RAB-A5c activity disturbed longitudinal growth, but unexpectedly increased the proportion of cellulose microfibrils that were arranged at right angles to the root’s main axis. Kirchhelle et al. propose that RAB-A5c controls growth direction by changing the cell wall’s mechanical properties at the edge where two cell faces meet. Cells can partially compensate for loss of this mechanism by increasing the number of microfibrils that are deposited in a parallel arrangement.
These findings demonstrate that there are two separate mechanisms that control in which direction root cells grow. All land plants have versions of the RAB-A5c protein, suggesting that the new mechanism revealed in this work may also be found in other plants. Understanding how plant cells control growth may benefit agriculture in the future, for example, by providing new targets to develop herbicides against weeds.
