Resolving the mechanism of plant cell expansion at high spatio-temporal resolution.

Plants critically shape ecosystems and our societies by converting sunlight and CO2 into O2 and bio-mass while they grow. Understanding this growth process constitutes a major frontier in plant research. Growth is a multi-scale process.

At a subcellular scale, it depends on the expansion of the cell walls, which involves changes in the chemistry and architecture of constituent polymer networks.

Very little is known on the nature and the control of the cell wall changes that are critical for growth, in striking contrast to the, often detailed, knowledge of growth-regulating signaling networks.

This is in part due to the lack of appropriate tools to study changes in the complex cell wall polymer assemblies that often occur at fast (~s) and small (