A Micromechanics Model for Turgor Pressure of Arabidopsis thaliana Protoplast

Understanding the key role of turgor pressure in plant growth and development is important for recognizing the mechanical behavior of plant cell wall material deposition. In this study, we developed a micromechanics model to demonstrate how uniaxial strain influences turgor pressure of isolated Arabidopsis thaliana protoplasts, and their deformation and morphogenesis. In this model, the protoplast is treated as an elastic inclusion in a surrounding agarose gel, allowing the turgor pressure in response to the 20 % uniaxial strain exerted on the protoplast–agarose gel composite material system. Based on the Eshelby method and the Mori–Tanaka’s theory (Eshelby in Proc R Soc Lond A 241(1226):376–396, 1957; Mori and Tanaka in Acta Metall 21(5):571–574, 1973), turgor pressure can be taken into account as a uniform strain acting on protoplasts. By using this model, the relationship between the plant cell morphology changes, and their effective properties are derived with a theoretical basis.