Category: The Plant Cell: In Brief

When I was a kid, I remember keeping a bottle of wite-out with my pens for the inevitable spelling mistake. Now, in the digital age, I either let my word processor autocorrect spelling errors or wait for the red squiggly line under suspicious words. On any given day, a single (plant) cell by far out-writes…

Storage and remobilization of sugar molecules play important roles for the growth and survival of living organisms. Besides a few exceptions, animals store carbohydrates in the form of soluble glycogen while green plants and algae bank glucans as insoluble starch. Starch forms the basis of human nutrition…

Physical access to regulatory DNA, including cis-regulatory sequences found within proximal promoters and distal enhancer elements, is a vital property of chromatin.  In turn, their access is determined by nucleosome occupancy and post-translational modification of histone proteins. A continuum of chromatin…

ADP-RIBOSYLATION FACTOR (ARF) proteins play essential roles in vesicle trafficking by regulating the formation of membrane vesicles that move cargo throughout the cell. Their activity is controlled by specific guanine exchange factors (ARF-GEFs) that activate ARFs by catalyzing a GDP to GTP exchange…

Cellulose, hemicellulose, and pectin are the brick and mortar of the plant kingdom, and how they are laid has substantial impacts on plant morphology.  Plant cell shape is dictated by the interplay between turgor pressure and heterogeneity in cell wall composition, whereby localized cell wall loosening…

Bacteria use stomatal pores as a point of entry to invade plant leaves. As a first line of defense, plants attempt to counteract this attack by restricting bacterial entry simply by closing the stomata. This happens via reduction in turgor pressure of the two guard cells flanking the stomatal pore, the…

The plant immune system is largely centered around immune receptors that monitor for pathogen-derived signatures. Extracellular immunity is afforded through cell-surface receptors recognizing common microbial motifs like bacterial flagellin or fungal chitin (Boutrot and Zipfel, 2017). By contrast, intracellular…

A single genome gives rise to different cell types and organs in response to precise temporal and spatial regulation of gene expression, driven by developmental and environmental cues. These expression patterns are orchestrated by cis-regulatory elements, distal enhancers and gene-proximal promoters.…