The Logistics of Plant Growth, Bridging the Gaps in Disparate Data - a Meta-Analysis

Quantifying cell growth is essential for understanding the biophysics of development and unveiling the effects of gene expression at the cellular level. However in plant biology, the majority of growth data is disparate and lacks a coherent framework, making it difficult to compare growth rates at different scales, between organs, and across different studies. In our meta-analysis, we have extracted and analysed growth data at the organ and cellular scale from hundreds of studies over 30 years and proposed a mathematical framework for comparing growth between different organs across developmental stages and types of cell dynamics. Our analysis revealed that probing growth at the cellular scale during organ initiation is key to understanding later developmental stages that lead to the organ final size. By providing a map of cell and organ expansion in different organs of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, our work serves as a benchmark for experimentalists and modellers who need a reference point of organ growth in controlled conditions. We begin to bridge the gap between growth at the cellular and organ scales and expose the lack of data at the crucial early stages. Finally, the framework we established for converting and presenting growth rate data can be used in future studies to aid comparison with other works.