Geometric and mechanical guidance: Role of stigmatic epidermis in early pollen tube pathfinding in arabidopsis

In Arabidopsis thaliana, successful fertilisation relies on the precise guidance of the pollen tube as it navigates through the female tissues to deliver sperm cells to ovules. While prior research has focused on pistil signals directing pollen tubes towards the ovules, the pollen tube growth within the stigmatic epidermis has received limited attention. Our recent work comparing wild-type pollen tube paths on wild-type and katanin1-5 stigmatic cells, revealed a tight connection between pollen tube directionality and mechanical properties of the invaded stigmatic cell. Given that most mechanical properties of the stigmatic tissue are experimentally challenging to access, we used mathematical modelling to investigate the mechanisms underlying early pollen tube guidance through the papilla cell wall. We found that in ktn1-5, the wild-type pollen tube navigates freely across the curved papilla surface, following curves close to geodesics, whereas the wild-type papilla imposes directional guidance. The order of magnitude analysis of the mechanical forces required for pollen tubes to progress at the papilla surface indicates that both the elongated geometry of the papilla and the difference in rigidity of its cell wall layers combine to efficiently orient the pollen tube towards the papilla base.