Research

A word cloud of our research focus:

What is plant mechanobiology?

Plant mechanobiology explores how mechanical forces shape plant growth, development, and structure, and how plants in turn generate, sense, and respond to these forces. It brings together biology, physics, and engineering to understand how plants adapt their form to both internal pressures, such as turgor and growth-induced stress, and external forces like gravity or wind. At the cellular level, plants detect mechanical cues through mechanosensitive ion channels and structural links between the cell wall, plasma membrane, and cytoskeleton. These signals guide how cells grow, divide, and orient their internal organization. As tissues grow, they generate mechanical stress, which feeds back into development, helping coordinate shape and maintain structural integrity. The cell wall plays a central role. It is a viscoelastic structure that resists turgor pressure but also yields to allow expansion. Plants actively tune wall stiffness and extensibility, largely through cytoskeletal dynamics and the patterned deposition of cellulose, to control growth direction and rate. Mechanobiology also explains how local mechanical interactions scale up to shape whole organs. For example, the jigsaw-like interlocking of pavement cells in Arabidopsis may emerge from mechanical constraints during tissue expansion (e.g., Trozzi et al., 2025). Overall, mechanobiology reveals how mechanical and biochemical signals are integrated to shape, stabilize, and adapt plant form.

What is experimental plant biomechanics?

Experimental plant biomechanics focuses on measuring and manipulating the mechanical properties of plant cells, tissues, and organs to understand how structure relates to function. It uses a broad range of techniques, including micro-indentation (e.g., Majda et al., 2019), extensometry (Majda et al., 2022; Trozzi et al., 2025), atomic force microscopy (Majda et al., 2017; Majda 2021), and osmotic treatments. These methods allow researchers to quantify stiffness, elasticity, extensibility and creep at multiple scales, from single cells to entire organs. By applying controlled forces and analyzing the resulting deformation or recovery, we can explore how tissues resist stress, how mechanical properties differ between genotypes or developmental stages, and how mechanical signals influence growth. Experimental biomechanics is essential for validating models of plant tissue mechanics and linking molecular and genetic changes to physical behavior.