Plant Cell Biology: When, How, and Why?

Abstract

About 250 years before Sachs’s definition of the cell, Robert Hooke observed cells for the first time on cork. Not only did Hooke’s observations start a new wave in the study of plant biology, but it also gave us the term “cell” (Hooke 1665; Gest 2009). The etymological roots of the term lie in the Latin word cellulae, which means hexagonal cells of the honeycomb (Mazzarello 1999). Soon after Hooke made his observations and coined the term “cell,” Antony van Leeuwenhoek discovered motile microorganisms (Ford 1995; Dunn and Jones 2004; Zwick and Schmidt 2014; Lane 2015; Wollman et al. 2015; Zuidervaart and Anderson 2016). Later, Marcello Malpighi and Nehemiah Grew published detailed observations of the different plant organs and tissues (Malpighi 1679; Grew 1682). Grew described the honeycomb-like cells, but also other forms of cells, which formed the bark and the pith (Grew 1682).

Julius Sachs (1875) defined cells as follows: “The substance of plants is not homogeneous, but is composed of small structures generally indistinguishable by the naked eye; and each of these, at least for a time, is a whole complete in itself, being composed of solid, soft, and fluid layers, different in their chemical nature, and disposed concentrically from without inwards. These structures are termed Cells.”