DATE2026.10.16 #Press Releases

Deciphering the “Memory of Cell Division” Preserved in Cell Shape

Disclaimer: machine translated by DeepL which may contain errors.

—A Method for Accurately Inferring Recent Cell Division Based on Cell Wall Staining in Plant Tissues—

Summary

Since plant cells do not move, determining which cells divided and in which direction is crucial for the formation of organ shapes. However, analyzing these division directions previously required a significant amount of time and careful consideration of experimental conditions.A joint research group led by Professor Hirokazu Tsukaya of the Graduate School of Science at The University of Tokyo, Professors Atsushi Mochizuki and Yasuhiro Inoue of Kyoto University, and Professor Gorou Horiguchi of Rikkyo University has developed a method to infer the most recent cell divisions with high accuracy and in large numbers from a single microscope image, using the “memory of division” preserved in the shape of plant cells.

Using live-imaging data recording cell division in Arabidopsis thaliana leaf primordia as ground-truth data, the researchers analyzed 49 types of morphological features across 7,573 pairs of adjacent cells. The results revealed that the“junction angle”, which appears at both ends of the cell wall shared by daughter cell pairs, was found to be the most effective for inferring recent daughter-cell pairs.In particular, when using an average junction angle of 145° or more as a threshold, the method achieved a precision of 94.1% and a recall of 92.5% . When this method was applied to meristematic tissues, it also demonstrated high performance, with a precision of 98.4% and a recall of 97.2%.

This study represents the world’s first quantitative validation of the accuracy of a method for inferring recent cell division from cell shape, using ground-truth data derived from live imaging.  Furthermore, this research demonstrated the potential for application to mutants and non-model plants and released analysis software that is accessible to anyone.

Inferring Recent Cell Division from Cell Shape

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