New study published

05.22.2020

In the conifer tree rings, all tracheids (tube-like cells forming most of wood tissue) go through three phases of differentiation before becoming an element of the stem water-conducting structure: division, extension, and cell wall thickening. These phases are long-lasting and separated temporally, especially the last one. Despite the numerous lines of evidence that external conditions affect the rate of growth processes and the final anatomical dimensions during the respective phases of tracheid differentiation, the influence of the environment during the cell division phase (cambial activity) on anatomical dimensions has not yet been experimentally confirmed. In the laboratory, indirect evidence of such an effect were obtained through observations of the small fluctuations in the latewood cell wall thickness of rapidly growing tree rings, which exhibit a high cell production rate (more than 0.4 cell per day on average). Such small fluctuations in the cell wall thickness cannot be driven by variations in external factors during the secondary wall deposition phase, since this phase in the rings of fast-growing trees overlaps for several tens of latewood cells.
The short communication of this study was published in the journal PLOS ONE: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0233106