Abstract
The development of a new organ is the result of coordinated events of cell division and expansion, in strong interaction with each other. This paper presents a dynamic model of tomato fruit development that includes cell division, endoreduplication and expansion processes. The model is used to investigate the potential interaction among these developmental processes, in the perspective of the neo-cellular theory. In particular, different control schemes (either cell-autonomous or organ-controlled) are tested and compared to experimental data related to two contrasted genotypes. The model shows that a pure cell-autonomous control fails to reproduce the observed cell size distribution, and an organ-wide control is required in order to get realistic cell size variations. The model also supports the role of endoreduplication as an important determinant of final cell size and suggests that a direct effect of endoreduplication on cell expansion is needed in order to obtain a significant correlation between size and ploidy, as observed in real data.
Footnotes
New calibration procedure; Results and Discussion updated;