Simultaneous measurement of turgor pressure and cell wall elasticity in growing pollen tubes

Plant growth and morphogenesis are tightly controlled processes of division and expansion of individual cells. To fully describe the factors that influence cell expansion, it is necessary to quantify the counteracting forces of turgor pressure and cell wall stiffness, which together determine whether and how a cell expands. Several methods have been developed to measure these parameters, but most of them provide only values for one or the other, and thus require complex models to derive the missing quantity. Furthermore, available methods for turgor measurement are either accurate but invasive, like the pressure probe; or they lack accuracy, such as incipient plasmolysis or indentation-based methods that rely on information about the mechanical properties of the cell wall. Here, we describe a system that overcomes many of the above-mentioned disadvantages using growing pollen tubes of Lilium longiflorum as a model. By combining non-invasive microindentation and cell compression experiments, we separately measure turgor pressure and cell wall elasticity on the same pollen tube in parallel. Due to the modularity of the setup and the large range of the micro-positioning system, our method is not limited to pollen tubes but could be used to investigate the biomechanical properties of many other cell types or tissues.