Launched in 2020, Quantitative Plant Biology is an open access journal, co-published by Cambridge University Press and The John Innes Centre with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for high quality research on ground-breaking discoveries and predictions in quantitative plant science.

We sat down with Associate Editor Bela Mulder to learn more about his background, and hear his thoughts on what this community-driven journal means for the plant science community.

My background

How I ended up studying plants can only be described as a “miracle of nature”. By training I am a theoretical physicist raised in the Dutch school of statistical mechanics. My PhD research was focused on the study of hard particle models for complex fluids such as colloids and liquid crystals. Surprisingly, it was the latter interest that brought me to the attention of Anne Mie Emons, a plant biologist for Wageningen University. At the time, the mid ‘90s, she was trying to understand the plant cell wall and specifically the striking spatial organization of the cellulose fibers therein. A group of French biophysicists had launched the hypothesis that this organization was best understood on the basis of liquid crystal physics with which she was not familiar. She approached me to help her make sense of these ideas. Needless to say, the moment I saw my first EM images of plant cell walls I was immediately hooked: what processes could possibly drive such robust ordering far more regular than what is achieved by non-living physical systems? The rest is history. After a few years I had redirected all my research in the direction of biophysics, accepted a part-time professorship in the Cell Biology lab at Wageningen and branched out into other topics in plant cellular biology.

What has been your biggest challenge/greatest achievement in your career so far?

The biggest challenge for a physicist working on biological systems is the abundance of tantalizingly phenomenological observations coupled to the absence of established theoretical frameworks. Trying to distill a quantitative model out of microscopy movies of limited resolution in time and space and a few perturbations obtained through hard-won mutants is daunting to say the least. One result, however, I must admit to being proud of: together with a team of very enthusiastic junior collaborators we managed to develop a theory for the self-organisation of the transverse cortical microtubule array in elongated plant cells. This theory showed that there is no royal road to understanding complexity in biological systems. It required the formulation and solution of a coupled set of non-linear integro-differential equations, which took a number of years to achieve. Along the way we also developed a state-of-the-art event-driven stochastic simulation scheme, which allows quasi-realistic simulations of cortical microtubule dynamics in arbitrary cell geometries that can be fully parametrized by experimental data.

Why did you decide to become an Associate Editor?

When Olivier Hamant asked me to join this project, I did not hesitate very long. I am glad for the opportunity to contribute to further developing the field of Quantitative Plant Biology, to which I have devoted a significant part of my scientific career.

What excites you about Quantitative Plant Biology?

It is immensely important to find a suitable forum for quantitative work focused on plant systems and this holds a fortiori for theoretical work. For better or worse plants are a bit of a niche in the wider biology world, and definitely an outlier as far as biophysics is concerned. This means that good work in this area often end up as an ‘orphan’ in other journals and inevitably limited in its visibility. Hopefully QPB will spawn a lively community that shares a passion for the deep scientific problems plants pose, which can only be tackled through a tight combination between quantitative experiments and theories, and helps to attract a new generation young researchers to this beautiful field.

To submit your paper, go to: cambridge.org/qpb and click on ‘submit your article’

You can also find lots of useful information under the information tab, such as: Instructions for contributors