Ultra-Fast Plant Defense: High-Speed Rupture of Tomato Glandular Trichomes

Original video: https://youtu.be/OHeV57k3AhU

Published on: 10 June 2025

Witness the ultra-fast defense mechanism of the tomato plant in extreme slow motion. This video features high-speed imaging at 28,000 frames per second (fps), capturing the precise moment of rupture in Type VI glandular trichomes.

Using specialized micropipette force sensors, researchers from the University of Amsterdam triggered the bursting of these specialized hair-like structures to study their biomechanics. These trichomes act as a "landmine" defense, releasing a sticky, toxic glandular fluid in under 1 millisecond upon contact.

What You Are Seeing:

• Wild Tomato Trichome (Solanum habrochaites): Known for having a larger intercellular storage cavity, these trichomes produce high levels of defensive sesquiterpenes. The rupture reveals a universal "brittle fracture" mechanism, where the gland head detaches suddenly without prior deformation.

  
  

• Cultivar Tomato Trichome (Solanum lycopersicum): While similar in rupture dynamics, cultivated varieties (like 'Moneymaker') often have smaller storage cavities and different metabolite compositions compared to their wild relatives.

  
  

• The Rupture Mechanism: Watch as the force loading from the micropipette leads to a sudden failure at the intermediate cell junction, releasing the solvent as a droplet that instantly wets the stalk to entrap potential pests.

Keywords: plant biomechanics, plant–insect interactions, trichomes

Citation:

Jared Popowski, Lucas Warma, Alicia Abarca Cifuentes, Petra Bleeker, Maziyar Jalaal, Glandular trichome rupture in tomato plants is an ultra-fast and sensitive defense mechanism against insects, Journal of Experimental Botany, Volume 76, Issue 21, 25 November 2025, Pages 6508–6519, https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/eraf257

Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0 - Creative Commons