Combined computational modeling and experimental analysis integrating chemical and mechanical signals suggests possible mechanism of shoot meristem maintenance
Table 1
Summary of cell-level features resulting from the testing of four hypothesized mechanisms of regulation compared to experiments.
N/A*: Heights and widths were not computed for the CAE-E mechanism since it failed to reproduce the percent periclinal and aspect ratio observed in wildtype experiments. N/A**: The combined mechanism was only simulated for wildtype conditions. *: Since we observed slightly more periclinal divisions in the Basal corpus for this mechanism compared to wildtype SAMs, this could explain why the distribution of mother cell orientations in this region does not directly match experiments. **: While we found that the distributions of mother cell widths for all three mechanisms were significantly different from daughters (inconsistent with experiments), all three mechanisms exhibit similar behavior to experiments in that we see an increase in the number of mother mother cells whose widths are above the average. ***: While we found that the distribution of mother cell heights was significantly different from daughters (inconsistent with experiments), the shape of the distributions for mother and daughter cell heights are similar to experiments. The second peak of the mother cell distribution could be due to the slightly higher number of periclinal divisions in this region compared to experiments. ****: While we found that the distributions of mother cell heights were significantly different from daughters (inconsistent with experiments), both mechanisms exhibit similar behavior to experiments in that we see an increase in the number of mother mother cells whose heights are above the average. *****: While we found that the distributions of mother cell widths were significantly different from daughters (inconsistent with experiments), both mechanisms exhibit similar behavior to experiments in that we see an increase in the number of mother mother cells whose widths are above the average. ******: While we observe significantly more periclinal divisions compared to experiments, the significant increase in periclinal divisions from the Apical corpus to the Basal corpus matched experimental trends.