video: An ordinary leaf sean under a microscope reveals an intercalated mosaic of puzzle-shaped pavement cells. Their undulating cellular contours are extracted, sonified (transformed to sound) so that their shapes represent notes from a chromatic scale. We use these cellular notes to play 'The Blue Danube' by J. Strauss and Russian folk song 'Kalinka' to show that the mathematical order of these cells' shape has similar properties to the sound produced by musical instruments. Zooming further at the cell wall with an electron microscope or a super-resolution optical microscope, nanofilaments of pectins appear. These nanofilaments can be chemically modified (demethylated) within the cell wall, causing their radial inflation. A computer model shows that such a self-expansion of the cell wall if occurs heterogeneously across the tissue, can generate a wavy pattern of pavement cells. This material relates to a paper that appeared in the 28 Feb issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by K.T. Haas at University of Cambridge in Cambridge, UK, and colleagues was titled, "Pectin homogalacturonan nanofilament expansion drives morphogenesis in plant epidermal cells." view more
Credit: [Credit: Kalina T. Haas & Alexis Peaucelle]