Plant Developmental Biology, TUM School of Life Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Freising, Germany.
Department of Comparative Developmental and Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, Germany.
Plant Physiol. 2022 Jun 27;189(3):1278-1295. doi: 10.1093/plphys/kiac145.
A fundamental question in biology concerns how molecular and cellular processes become integrated during morphogenesis. In plants, characterization of 3D digital representations of organs at single-cell resolution represents a promising approach to addressing this problem. A major challenge is to provide organ-centric spatial context to cells of an organ. We developed several general rules for the annotation of cell position and embodied them in 3DCoordX, a user-interactive computer toolbox implemented in the open-source software MorphoGraphX. 3DCoordX enables rapid spatial annotation of cells even in highly curved biological shapes. Using 3DCoordX, we analyzed cellular growth patterns in organs of several species. For example, the data indicated the presence of a basal cell proliferation zone in the ovule primordium of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Proof-of-concept analyses suggested a preferential increase in cell length associated with neck elongation in the archegonium of Marchantia (Marchantia polymorpha) and variations in cell volume linked to central morphogenetic features of a trap of the carnivorous plant Utricularia (Utricularia gibba). Our work demonstrates the broad applicability of the developed strategies as they provide organ-centric spatial context to cellular features in plant organs of diverse shape complexity.
生物学中的一个基本问题是，分子和细胞过程如何在形态发生过程中整合。在植物中，以单细胞分辨率对器官的 3D 数字表示进行特征描述代表了解决这个问题的一种有前途的方法。一个主要的挑战是为器官的细胞提供以器官为中心的空间背景。我们制定了一些细胞位置注释的一般规则，并将其体现在 3DCoordX 中，这是一个在开源软件 MorphoGraphX 中实现的用户交互计算机工具包。3DCoordX 使即使在高度弯曲的生物形状中也能快速进行细胞的空间注释。使用 3DCoordX，我们分析了几个物种器官中的细胞生长模式。例如，数据表明拟南芥（Arabidopsis thaliana）胚珠原基中存在基细胞增殖区。概念验证分析表明，与颈伸长相关的细胞长度优先增加，在卷柏（Marchantia polymorpha）的颈卵器中以及与肉食植物狸藻（Utricularia gibba）的中央形态发生特征相关的细胞体积变化与中心形态发生特征相关。我们的工作表明，所开发的策略具有广泛的适用性，因为它们为不同形状复杂性的植物器官中的细胞特征提供了以器官为中心的空间背景。
