Cartography of cell morphology in tomato pericarp at the fruit scale.

In fleshy fruits, the variability of cell morphology at the fruit scale is largely unknown. It presents both a huge variability and a high level of organization. Better knowledge of cell morphology heterogeneity within the fruit is necessary to understand fruit development, to model fruit mechanical behaviour, or to investigate variations of physico-chemical measurements. A generic approach is proposed to build cartographies of cell morphology at the fruit scale, which depict regions corresponding to different cell morphologies. The approach is based on: (1) sampling the whole fruit at known positions; (2) imaging and quantifying local cell morphology; (3) pooling measurements to take biological variability into account and (4) projecting results in a morphology model of the whole fruit. The result is a synthetic representation of cell morphology variations within the whole fruit. The method was applied to the characterization of cell morphology in tomato pericarp. Two different imaging scales that provided complementary descriptions were used: 3D confocal microscopy and macroscopy. The approach is generic and can be adapted to other fruits or other products.