Guillermo S. Moreno Pescador

Project title

PLANTFORCE – Uncovering Biophysical Forces Shaping Plant Function

What is your project about?

Plants cannot run away from stress. They push roots through hard soil, hold their shape against wind and gravity, and keep every cell pressurised like a small tyre. All of this is mechanics, yet we still lack reliable ways to measure the forces at work inside living plants. PLANTFORCE builds that toolbox. With laser-based optical tweezers we pull on single plant cell membranes and measure the tiny forces proteins use to shape them. With Brillouin microscopy, which reads stiffness from how light scatters off natural sound waves in the tissue, we map how growing roots stiffen and soften, also when they meet compacted soil. The goal is a common, calibrated language for force in plant biology, from the molecule to the organism level.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

I came to biology through sound. I trained as an acoustic engineer, and what fascinated me was how mechanical waves reveal hidden properties of materials. During my PhD at the Niels Bohr Institute I moved to optical tweezers and learned to use light to push, pull and heat single membranes and nanoparticles. When I started working with plants, I realised how much of their life is pure physics: huge internal pressure, stiff walls, roots drilling through soil. Yet the field mostly describes these forces rather than measuring them. Brillouin microscopy closed the circle for me, because it literally bridges sound with biophysics to measure stiffness in living organisms. Suddenly my engineering past and my biophysics training pointed at the same question.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

The main challenge is that force is hard to measure in something alive, soft and growing. Plant cells sit inside a stiff wall under high pressure, so tools developed for animal cells do not simply transfer. Each of our methods sees a different scale and has its own blind spots, so a big part of the project is making them agree: calibrating them against each other on the same plants, so that a number from a membrane experiment can be compared with a number from a root. If we succeed, plant biologists get something they have been missing, namely quantitative and comparable measurements of mechanics. That opens questions that are hard to ask today, for instance how the pull of single proteins on a membrane adds up to a root that can force its way through hard ground.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

Much of the future of agriculture will be decided underground. Heavy machinery and a changing climate make soils harder and drier, and roots that cannot get through them limit crop yields. Today breeders mostly see the end result, a short or weak root system, but not the mechanics behind it. By measuring how roots adjust their stiffness and internal pressure to push through soil, our work can point to the traits and genes that make plants mechanically resilient, and give breeders gentle, non-destructive ways to screen for them. The instruments also have value beyond plants. Label-free mechanical imaging and parallel microfluidic testing are relevant for biotechnology and medicine, and we aim to share them so that other labs can use them too. 

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

Sapere Aude lets me build a research group around my own scientific question rather than around the equipment at hand. Over the past years I have put a lot of energy into building shared microscopy infrastructure at the University of Copenhagen. This grant allows me to turn that infrastructure into a coherent research programme, with a PhD student and a postdoc working on the same central problem. The recognition matters just as much. For someone who moved from engineering into plant biology, having DFF back that crossover is a strong signal, to me and to the field. It also gives me the independence and leadership experience I need to go for larger European grants such as an ERC grant.