Clonal aspects of plant cell proliferation and their applications to animal cells and bacteria

Abstract.   Objectives : Extensive mathematical studies have been made on cell clone development but little has been advanced in the mathematics of small clone formation and virtually no actual data of small clone size has been collected. Materials and methods : Small clone sizes in leaf marginal cells of the aquatic plant Elodea and aleurone spot sizes in the grain of Zea were counted for later statistical analyses of mean, variance and probability distribution frequencies. Results : Simple mathematical models were developed and their calculated results are comparable to data collected on actual plant clones. The parameters in these models were original cell size ( s ₀), growth rate ( T ), duration of growth ( t ) and cell division inequality ( i ). Conclusions : Given T and t , the critical parameter is s ₀. Plant tissue is ideal material to collect data on clone development because growth rate is uniform across a tissue and cells remain in place, so clone size can be measured, unlike microbes and animal cells that have neither feature. In the light of the results, traditional methods for calculating cell cycle duration and mutation rate are questioned. The applications of these plant features to studies on animal cell populations are discussed.