Philip M. Lintilhac

American botanist
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Philip M. Lintilhac
Born
Shanghai, China
Alma materUniversity of Vermont
University of California, Berkeley
Known forCell biology
Cell biophysics
Plant morphology
AwardsBotanical Society of America Centennial Award (2006)
Scientific career
FieldsBotany
InstitutionsUniversity of Vermont

Philip Malcolm Lintilhac (born March 12, 1940) is an American botanist and cell biologist, known for his pioneering work in the study of plant developmental biomechanics and for his novel experimental and theoretical approaches to the study of plant tissue architecture, for which he was awarded the Botanical Society of America’s Centennial award in 2006. He is currently a research associate professor at the University of Vermont.[1]

Career

Early scientific work on the ultrastructure of photosynthetic chloroplasts at the University of California, Berkeley, with Dr. Roderic Park helped resolve an emerging question regarding the nature of the initial “light-harvesting” reactions of photosynthesis by showing that the chlorophyll molecules were tightly bound into the thylakoid membranes of chloroplasts, rather than being dispersed in solution through the liquid stroma. This confirmed the hypothesis that the initial energy-capture reactions of the chlorophyll molecules were accomplished by solid-state energy transfer through a membrane-bund substrate, rather than by solution chemistry (Lintilhac & Park 1966). Working at the Laboratory of Chemical Biodynamics, established by Dr. Melvin Calvin.

Lintilhac and Park combined electron-microscopy with early fluorescence microscopy to show that the characteristic long-wavelength fluorescence of the chlorophyll molecule coincided exclusively with the membrane portion of chloroplast thylakoids, indicating that the active light-harvesting reactions were aligned with the chloroplast thylakoid membranes.

After this early experimental success his interests shifted to the study of the embryological anatomy of the cotton plant (Gossypium hirsutum) where he began a lifelong interest in the biomechanics and biophysics of plant cell and tissue architecture.

In a series of papers published in the American Journal of Botany in 1974, using simple photoelastic models observed in polarized light, he demonstrated that the precise cell wall placements during cell division in actively growing plant tissues are governed by simple stress-mechanical rules. Lintilhac was able to show that cell wall patterning in the immature cotton ovule coincide with the principal stress trajectories generated by growth forces radiating through the embryonic tissues, indicating that cell division itself is directly responsive to mechanical stress fields propagating through meristematic plant tissues. He then applied the same photoelastic methodology to illustrate the fact that many other aspects of plant growth and development are reducible, in principle, to basic physical interactions. This work began to build a general theory of plant growth that ascribes many aspects of structural development to biophysical and biomechanical control systems that supersede and augment the more traditional molecular and genetic control systems that were typically considered to be in control of all plant development (Lintilhac 2014).

Lintilhac obtained patents for related biomechanical research instrumentation, including a sterilizable mechanical forcing-frame for studying the effects of controlled external forces applied to living plant tissues in culture, and a patent describing the first non-destructive method for measuring the internal turgor-pressures of living plant cells. Most recently Lintilhac & Grasso have developed a method for microfluidic encapsulation of individual, living plant cells into microscopic polymer beads, enabling the study of individual plant cells under controlled mechanical conditions.

Lintilhac's work continues to be based on the proposition that the evolution of land plant architecture has been driven, to a great extent, by the ability of plant tissues to interpret and respond to complex mechanical signals that control many aspects of plant morphogenesis, and which are largely responsible for the characteristic patterning of growing plant tissues. Most recently, Lintilhac has proposed the theoretical argument that the initiation of reproductive differentiation in plants can similarly be traced to biomechanical relationships in the early stages of sporangial growth, linking reproductive development in all the land plants to the evolution of the sporangium as a biomechanical device.

Lintilhac's work has come to be known for his novel interpretation of issues that had previously only been approached in terms of molecular signaling and hormonal specificity, regarding them instead as issues that could be resolved in terms of a unifying deterministic theory of plant biomechanics.[2]

Publications

References

  1. ^ "Philip M. Lintilhac". The University of Vermont. Retrieved 2022-09-12.
  2. ^ "A new tool to study plant cell biomechanics". Phys.org.