Our lab is excited to share that Dr. Si Chen, ELMI and Fleming Postdoctoral Fellow, is the first author of our new paper, “Fibrous network nature of plant cell walls enables tunable mechanics for development,” published in Nature Communications.

This interdisciplinary study, at the interface of solid mechanics and plant developmental biology, was made possible through collaborations fostered by the Engineered Living Materials Institute (ELMI).

In this work, we show that plant primary cell walls behave like nonlinear fibrous networks, allowing them to stretch, reorient, and adapt their structure. Using both experiments and modeling, we uncovered the deformation mechanisms behind this behavior, examined how cell wall mechanics change during growth, and explored a mutant with altered leaf shape.

Together, these findings reveal how the fibrous architecture of cell walls provides tunable mechanical properties, enabling plants to adjust growth in ways that support proper development.

Congratulations to Si and the team for this exciting step toward engineering living systems into functional, sustainable materials! Special shout out to co-author and former MMD undergrad Bex Pendrak (now a Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate at Columbia University) for initiating this collaboration.