ABSTRACT
Organ sizes and shapes are highly reproducible, or robust, within a species and individuals. Arabidopsis thaliana sepals, which are the leaf-like organs that enclose flower buds, have consistent size and shape, indicating robust development. Cell growth is locally heterogeneous due to intrinsic and extrinsic noise. To achieve robust organ shape, fluctuations in cell growth must average to an even growth rate, which requires that fluctuations are uncorrelated or anti-correlated in time and space. Here, we live image and quantify the development of sepals with an increased or decreased number of cell divisions (lgo mutant and LGO overexpression, respectively), a mutant with altered cell growth variability (ftsh4), and double mutants combining these. Changes in the number of cell divisions do not change the overall growth pattern. By contrast, in ftsh4 mutants, cell growth accumulates in patches of over- and undergrowth owing to correlations that impair averaging, resulting in increased organ shape variability. Thus, we demonstrate in vivo that the number of cell divisions does not affect averaging of cell growth, preserving robust organ morphogenesis, whereas correlated growth fluctuations impair averaging.
Footnotes
Author contributions
Conceptualization: I.B., A.H.K.R.; Methodology: I.B., A.H.K.R.; Validation: I.B.; Formal analysis: I.B., F.B., C.-B.L.; Investigation: I.B.; Resources: F.K.C.; Data curation: I.B.; Writing - original draft: I.B.; Writing - review & editing: I.B., F.B., F.K.C., C.-B.L., A.H.K.R.; Visualization: I.B., F.B., C.-B.L.; Supervision: A.H.K.R.; Project administration: A.H.K.R.; Funding acquisition: A.H.K.R.
Funding
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01GM134037 (to A.H.K.R.) and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation post-doctoral fellowship award #2919 (to F.B.). A.H.K.R. and F.B. thank the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) for support and hospitality during the 2023 Morphogenesis Program funded by National Science Foundation grant PHY-2309135 and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant 2919.02. Deposited in PMC for release after 12 months.
Data availability
Data for this project is available at Burda, I. (2023); doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/7NMK3.
The people behind the papers
This article has an associated ‘The people behind the papers’ interview with some of the authors.