Coupling mechanical and hydraulic processes in multicellular models of plant development.

The study of plant growth has recently been revisited with the new possibility to investigate the dynamics of growth at tissue level. Experimental set-ups have now dramatically progressed and make it possible to measure growth variable (geometry, rigidity of cell walls, pressures, …). This opens the way to study how tissues acquire their shapes through genetic and mechanical processes. Up to now, models of shape development have mainly focussed on cell wall properties at cellular level (rigidity and anisotropy). However, growth is primarily powered by water fluxes and cell turgor. In this work, we propose a new multicellular model to study the interaction between the hydraulic and mechanical processes involved in tissue development. In this model, turgor pressure appears as a flexible variable that can mediate between various growth constraints.