Variability and Constancy in Cellular Growth of Arabidopsis Sepals

Growth of tissues is highly reproducible; yet, growth of individual cells in a tissue is highly variable, and neighboring cells can grow at different rates. We analyzed the growth of epidermal cell lineages in the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) sepal to determine how the growth curves of individual cell lineages relate to one another in a developing tissue. To identify underlying growth trends, we developed a continuous displacement field to predict spatially averaged growth rates. We showed that this displacement field accurately describes the growth of sepal cell lineages and reveals underlying trends within the variability of in vivo cellular growth. We found that the tissue, individual cell lineages, and cell walls all exhibit growth rates that are initially low, accelerate to a maximum, and decrease again. Accordingly, these growth curves can be represented by sigmoid functions. We examined the relationships among the cell lineage growth curves and surprisingly found that all lineages reach the same maximum growth rate relative to their size. However, the cell lineages are not synchronized; each cell lineage reaches this same maximum relative growth rate but at different times. The heterogeneity in observed growth results from shifting the same underlying sigmoid curve in time and scaling by size. Thus, despite the variability in growth observed in our study and others, individual cell lineages in the developing sepal follow similarly shaped growth curves.