Artificial scaffolds that mimic the plant extracellular environment for the culture and attachment of plant cells

Plant growth and development involves an intricate program of cell division and cell expansion to generate different cell types, tissue patterns and organ shapes. Plant cells are stuck together by their cell walls and the spatial context of cells within tissues plays a critical role in cell fate specification and morphogenesis. An in vitro model system to study plant development and its regulation by various extrinsic and intrinsic factors requires the ability to mimic the physical interactions between cells and their environment. Here, we present a set of artificial scaffolds to which cultured tobacco BY-2 cells adhere without causing morphological abnormalities. These scaffolds mimic native plant cell walls in terms of their fibrous nature, charge, hydrophobicity and piezoelectricity. We found that the extent of plant cell adhesion was essentially insensitive to the stiffness, fiber dimension, and fiber orientation of the scaffolds, but was affected by the piezoelectric properties of scaffolds where adhesion increased on piezoelectric materials. We also found that the plant cell wall polysaccharide, pectin, is largely responsible for adhesion to scaffolds, analogous to pectin-mediated adhesion of plant cells in tissues. Together, this work establishes biomimetic scaffolds that realistically emulate the plant tissue environment and provide the capability to develop microfluidic devices to study how cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions affect plant developmental pathways.