Live Plant Cell Tracking: A Fiji plugin to analyze cell proliferation dynamics and understand morphogenesis (Plant Physiol.)

Live Plant Cell Tracking: A Fiji plugin to analyze cell proliferation dynamics and understand morphogenesis

Morphogenesis in plants occurs in 3D space over time, referred to as 4D. Recent advances in high-resolution microscopy imaging and computational pipelines have helped to better understand plant organ development at cellular resolution. Hernández-Herrera et al. developed a plugin, “Live Plant Cell Tracking” (LiPlaCeT),” which allows the analysis of 4D data to extract quantitative cellular parameters underlying organogenesis. The Arabidopsis thaliana primary root apical meristem (RAM) and lateral root primordia (LRPs) were analyzed with LiPlaCeT. The authors focused on the analysis of cell cycle duration in the LRP central and longitudinally flanking domains. Their findings showed that the cell cycle number in the flanking domain was two-fold lower than in the central one. In addition, they performed analysis in the whole RAM region, extracting data such as distance to the initial nucleus, the distance between nuclei, cell growth, cell displacement, and proliferation activity. The authors show that LiPlaCeT is another way to analyze the 4D complexity of plant organs in detail, which will help the scientific community to understand critical developmental processes during plant morphogenesis. (Summary by Andrea Gómez Felipe @andreagomezfe) Plant Physiol. 10.1093/plphys/kiab530