3D plant cell wall
15 June 2015 - Plant Cell Wall in 3D...in the hand!

15 June 2015 - Plant Cell Wall in 3D...in the hand!

The architecture of plant cell walls has been built using 3D printing

3D printing is a new way to build objects, providing their structure is known. To do that, an object can be scanned in 3D or its structure can be obtained by tomography. This approach has been applied to a section of plant cell wall of a few tens of micrometers hight and observed as slices of 0.3 µm thickness in fluorescence confocal microscopy. The stack of images obtained has been used to reconstruct the plant cell wall in 3D. After a conversion of these data into the format required for 3D printing, a 3D model of plant cell wall 10 cm size has been printed in polylactic acid, in a few hours. It shows at a macroscopic scale the complexity - and beauty - of plant cell walls.

We specially thank our colleagues from Reims University: C. Terryn from PICT for image acquisition and M. Dauchez, N. Belloy, R. Vuiart and H. Wong from P3M in MaSCA for 3D printing.

Contact: Dr Gabriel Paës, gabriel.paes@reims.inra.fr

Modification date: 06 June 2023 | Publication date: 15 June 2015 | By: G. Paës