Fig. 1.

Liquid droplets wet and deform vacuolar membranes in living plant embryos. (A) A. thaliana embryo at walking stick developmental stage. (B) Embryonic cotyledon (leaf) expressing the tonoplast protein GFP-TPK1 (membrane, green). (C) Homogeneous vacuolar lumina characteristic of young vacuoles. Arrowheads, tonoplast-derived nanotubes. Individual frame from Movie S1. (D) Vacuolar liquid subcompartments $\alpha$ and $\beta$ wet enclosing tonoplast. The droplet interface $\alpha \beta$ causes vacuole deformation and budding. (E and F) Tonoplast nanotubes wet the droplet interface. (G and H) Spontaneous droplet formation, flow, fusion, and repositioning observed by live-cell imaging. Snapshots from data shown in Movies S3 and S4. (I) Individual droplet FRAP data (blue dots). Fitted curves, black lines, n = 14 across three independent experiments. Red line, global fit. (Inset) Representative time series. Mean ± SD are shown. Confocal live-cell imaging. Vacuolar lumina (magenta) stained by 20 µM neutral red (NR) or expression of 2S1-GFP. (Scale bars: white, 2.5 µm; black, 100 µm.)