Category: The Plant Cell: In Brief

The environment plays a major role in determining whether, when, and how growth occurs, and resource allocation towards growth is an important factor in many contexts. For example, plants whose defenses against pathogens are activated often grow less, and plants that must grow taller to reach the light…

Disease resistance (R) receptors detect pathogen effector-mediated host manipulation and induce effector-triggered immunity (ETI) that is often associated with programmed cell death. R proteins are generally conserved across plants, consisting of nucleotide-binding site and leucine rich repeat (NBS-LRR)…

The Golgi apparatus is the central sorting station of the eukaryotic secretory pathway. Protein and lipid cargoes are received at its cis face from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and may undergo various modifications including glycosylation before being trafficked onwards from the trans face to their…

Plants have armed themselves with a battalion of photoreceptors to cope with changes in light quantity, quality and direction. Light perception is especially critical when the seedling first emerges from the darkness of the soil and engages the red/far-red light photoreceptors phytochromes (phys). An…

The cell cycle is a tightly coordinated dance with the ultimate goal of dividing one cell into two. Eukaryotic cells tend to divide in the same general pattern, broadly reduced to four phases; cells increase organelle content in the G1 phase, DNA replication occurs in S phase, cells grow in size and…

In Arabidopsis thaliana and related species within the Mustard family (Brassicaceae), the tryptophan (trp)-derived antimicrobial metabolite camalexin (3-thiazol-2-yl-indole) plays a central role in defense against bacterial, fungal, and oomycete pathogens. Upon pathogen attack, cytochrome P450 monooxygenases…

Senescence results from two ineluctable laws of nature: every living entity will eventually die and when it does, nothing will be lost, as everything will be recycled. At the organism level, senescence is an integral part of the plant life cycle, under strict age-dependent genetic control.  This dismantlement…

Modern-day chloroplasts are the descendants of a photosynthetic cyanobacterium that took up residence inside the cytoplasm of a eukaryotic cell. Since this initial cohabitation agreement, the cyanobacterial endosymbiont has dumped most of its genome into the host eukaryotic genome. This creates an engineering…