A Device for Plant Cell Wall Testing in Tensile Loading

摘要

Understanding the plant cell wall's mechanical behavior at the fragment level will provide invaluable insights and lead to establishing a critical missing link between the role of physical properties, arrangement and interaction of major structural polysaccharides of cell walls to its overall mechanical responses. However, due to the microscale size, plant cell walls are yet to be characterized at the fragment level (cellular level) under tensile loading. One of the major challenges lies in developing a tensile testing device that can handle biological material and has submicron level force and displacement measuring capabilities to test cellular level plant cell wall fragment. An external piezoelectric actuation-based MEMS (Microelecromechanical System) tensile testing device suitable for cell wall testing was developed. Preliminary results are presented.