It’s good to plan, especially when you are competing for space in a high-impact academic journal read by scientists the world over. But sometimes pure accident plays an influential part in achieving your ambitions: a chance observation that morphs into a major clue that leads to a brand-new view of the world.

In the case of Dr Robert Kelly-Bellow and colleagues, the accident was a glimpse of a “wobbly spine” in a dwarf variety of an obscure aquatic plant called Utricularia gibba.

It was an observation made possible because the stem of this carnivorous bladderwort was hollow, enabling Rob and his colleague Karen Lee to observe the warped nature of the plant’s vascular system.

From this initial discovery, Rob and colleagues pieced together a trail which eventually led to a front-page illustration in the journal Science and an article which lent fresh perspective on the mechanics of multicellular organisms and how they maintain integrity between their various layers.

Rob had made it onto the front page of Science (as joint first author with Karen) in his first academic paper; an honour which left him feeling grateful to the expert team of colleagues at the John Innes Centre, and thankful for a twist of scientific good fortune.

“I had read beforehand that a lot of interesting discoveries are made by accident, and when we stumbled across this wobbly spine in Utricularia…it was a complete accident,” he recalls.

“We had been interested in the trap which the plant uses to ensnare prey, and this mutant had a slightly different shaped trap. The epidermal cells looked smaller and shorter, and we wanted to quantify this. I had previously presented this work and one bit of the feedback from a principal investigator was, “It’s a bit of a boring mutant isn’t it!”

“I had spent two years working on this! In retrospect he was right, it was a dull phenotype but it’s only by looking at the whole picture that you stumble on something else. I was imaging the internode region of the stem and suddenly there it was, the wobbly middle, and I thought, “That is a bit weird, you don’t see that in the wild type.”

From this initial discovery, the John Innes Centre team called on years of expertise, technical support and computational modeling techniques. The team hypothesized that the ‘wobbly middle’ was the result of a conflict between external and internal cells.

It suggested that this dwarf variety, such as the Utricularia mutant, and certain dwarf varieties of wheat, barley and other major crops – are not dwarf all over. The dwarfing affects only the outer skin of the plant, the epidermis, while the middle tissues try to continue to grow, and effectively the outer layer is acting as a sort of straitjacket.

The group explored the role of a plant growth hormone called brassinosteroid, which in the dwarf plant was not properly synthesized, but in normal plants it seems to play a role in reducing stresses between tissue layers – by loosening the walls of the epidermis.

To test their hypothesis, they turned to a familiar ally – the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family, and one of the first plants to be genetically sequenced.

They took advantage of an Arabidopsis mutant, one where the glue between cells is weaker so that it is prone to crack and crossed this with a dwarf brassinosteroid mutant.

With this combined mutation they hypothesized that they would get major cracks forming due to the release of the ‘straitjacket’ effect and the looser glue within cells.

The hypothesis was proved correct as the skin of the Arabidopsis double mutant was completely ripped off, the plant almost skinless due to the combination of the cell adhesion mutation and the lack of brassinosteroid.

The warped middle in Utricularia had led the team to a new view on how growth is controlled across layers of cells. Previously it was assumed that this kind of intracellular co-ordination was controlled by chemical signaling. This study showed that it is direct mechanical forces, the physical contact between cells, that also enable cellular layers to interact.

The findings have fascinating implications for dwarf varieties of crops, which will be needed to combat the effects of climate change.

They also explain at a genetic level how mechanical forces affect animal tissues, such as cracks in crocodile skins, or the fingerlike projections called villi in the intestine.

For Rob, it may seem that he cracked it at the first attempt. But he is keen to stress that this was a team effort. This includes work carried out over many years by colleagues who have developed Utricularia gibba into a model plant system which can be used for the study of plant mechanics and morphology. Also, he stresses the importance of computational work carried out by Richard Kennaway and Richard Smith, and the experience of his group leader Professor Enrico Coen, who helped to keep the project going forward in the face of inevitable setbacks.

“This will be a tough act to follow but it’s given me a blueprint of how to do science,” says Rob. “We tried a few different hypotheses and most fell flat. Having someone like Rico say which threads might work, and which might not, helped what was an iterative process.

“The level of precision and understanding you need for a quality paper like this is very high, and at times I wondered if I had the energy or enthusiasm in the face of the high level of criticism that you get when submitting to a journal such as Science.”

Rob, now a researcher in the group of Dr Richard Smith, uses a combination of robotics and imaging to perturb plants and track the effects.

By ‘torturing’ the plant through pulling, pushing, or poking, his research can reveal some of nature’s secrets as to which forces are at play.

“Being involved in this paper has given me an exceptionally good basis to explore new ideas and a good sense of how to critique ideas and question them well. Through this work with Rico and Richard, the idea of developing thinking about mechanical interaction in plants is something I want to follow more.”

While reaching giddy heights in his first paper, there’s plenty to keep Rob’s feet on the ground as a parent: “I had about three minutes of feeling proud when the paper came out before I was handed a crying baby and got thrown up on. It very quickly brought me down to earth.”