title: Widespread mechanosensing controls the structure behind the architecture in plants.
abstract: Mechanical forces play an instructing role for many aspects of animal cell biology, such as division, polarity and fate. Although the associated mechanoperception pathways still remain largely elusive in plants, physical cues have long been thought to guide development in parallel to biochemical factors. With the development of new imaging techniques, micromechanics tools and modeling approaches, the role of mechanical signals in plant development is now re-examined and fully integrated with modern cell biology. Using recent examples from the literature, I propose to use a multiscale perspective, from the whole plant down to the cell wall, to fully appreciate the diversity of developmental processes that depend on mechanical signals. Incidentally, this also illustrates how conceptually rich this field is.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Reproduction et Développement des Plantes, INRA, CNRS, ENS, UCB, Lyon 1, France; Laboratoire Joliot Curie, CNRS, ENS Lyon, Université de Lyon, 46 Allée d'Italie, Lyon Cedex 07 69364, France. Electronic address: Olivier.hamant@ens-lyon.fr.
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Hamant
mesh_terms: D002450:Cell Communication; D002473:Cell Wall / Q000378:metabolism*; D004777:Environment; D040542:Mechanotransduction, Cellular; D018521:Plant Physiological Phenomena; D010944:Plants / Q000033:anatomy & histology*