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Congratulations to Shaobao Liu for his research paper published in Soft Matter

2017/03/29      view:

Recently, Ph.D. student Shaobao Liu from BEBC has published his research paper in Soft Matter entitled “Fountain streaming contributes to fast tip-growth through regulating the gradients of turgor pressure and concentration in pollen tubes ".

Fast tip growth of pollen tube is a vital process in sexual plant reproduction. In the process of sexual reproduction of higher plants, the growth rate of pollen tubes at up to 0.6 mm/h (the fastest growing plant cell types known) is rather impressive. Fountain streaming is a typical microfluidic patterned activity within plant cells, especially for cells with high aspect ratio such as pollen tube. Fountain streaming plays crucial roles in the transport of nutrients and metabolites, the positioning of organelles and the mixing of cytoplasm, whereas, its implications for the fast tip growth of pollen tube remain a mystery. In this paper, based on the observations of asiatic lily Lilium Casablanca, physical models of fountain streaming in pollen tubes were introduced to solve the hydrodynamics and advection-diffusion dynamics of viscous Stokes flow in the shank and apical region of a pollen tube. Theoretical and numerical results demonstrated that the gradients of turgor pressure and concentration along the length of pollen tubes continuously provide undamped driving force and rich materials transport for the fast tip growth of pollen tubes. Simple experiments confirm that the tip shape and growth rate of pollen tube were influenced by the changes of turgor pressure gradients induced by osmotic stress. The proposed models and experimental verifications provide mechanistic insight into fountain streaming that positively contributes to the fast pollen tube tip growth process. These may be helpful for further understanding the sexual reproduction and infertility of flowering plants under normal conditions and drought stress.

 

The work is under the guidance of Profs. Feng Xu and Tianjian Lu. The co-authors of the paper include Han Liu (Co-first author), ShangSheng Feng, Min Lin, Feng Xu and Tian Jian Lu. This paper has been selected as the Inside Front Cover of Soft Matter.

 

Paper link: http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2017/sm/c6sm01915c