Fine Structure of Cell Walls in Fresh Plant Tissues

Abstract

THE increasing preoccupation of plant physiological laboratories throughout the world with problems of growth makes it very desirable that the details of structure in the cell wall, in growing tissue, should be known as completely as possible in the condition occurring in the living tissue itself. A good deal of the discussion arising from growth studies centres around the configuration of the cell wall, and the facile generalization of the striking results of X-ray analysis in dried material to cover the condition in fresh tissue is perhaps not a priori legitimate; for it is highly improbable that the dried material, even when rewetted, can be considered with any exactitude as equivalent to the original material fresh from the plant. In point of fact, attention was directed some years ago to the implications of the fact that in bacterial cellulose the planes of 6.1 A.-spacing lie parallel to the surface of the cellulose plate only after drying¹, so that the demonstration of the special orientation of dried walls of Valonia² and Cladophora³ did not necessarily guarantee a similar orientation in fresh material.