Recent Posts

Dark-Induced Nuclear Positioning in Leaf Cells

The appropriate spatial arrangement of nuclei is essential for various cellular activities during cell division, growth, migration, and differentiation in eukaryotes. In plants, nuclear positioning is also required for proper responses to environmental stimuli, including pathogen infection, touch, temperature,…

Auxin Function in a Brown Alga


Auxin controls body plan patterning in land plants and it has been proposed to play a similar role in the development of brown algae (Phaeophyta) despite their distant evolutionary relationship with land plants. In flowering plants and many multicellular brown algae, the establishment of the apical-basal…

Re-establishment of PIN2 polarity after cell division (Nature Plants)

Plant cells have polarity, with the distribution of the auxin transporter protein PIN2 being a well-described example. Glanc et al. investigated how polarity is re-established following cell division. The authors showed that during cytokinesis, protein trafficking is directed towards the central cell…

Autophagy and Chloroplast Quality Control: Fatty Acid Synthesis Counts

Plants devote more than 70% of their available nitrogen to maintaining chloroplast function (Makino and Osmond, 1991). During senescence or under stress conditions, chloroplasts are degraded and their constituent components are recycled. Chloroplasts can be degraded through at least three pathways: (1)…

Symplastic coordination of root nodule development (Curr. Biol.)

The establishment of root nodule symbiosis in legume roots involves the perception, infection, and accommodation of nitrogen-fixing rhizobia. The de novo formation of root nodules relies on complex developmental programs coordinated through different tissues via unknown cellular routes. Gaudioso-Pedraza…

Quantitative imaging to investigate regulators of membrane trafficking in Arabidopsis stomatal closure ($) Traffic

Properly functioning guard cells change size in response to myriad stimuli to control the passage of water and gasses through stomata. The change in volume is mirrored by changes in plasma membrane surface area, with membrane moving dynamically between tonoplast and plasma membrane as needed. Bourdais…

Editorial. Counting what counts: quantitative approaches in plant cell biology (COPB)

In the new Cell Biology issue of Current Opinion in Plant Biology, editors Haswell and Dixit have chosen to focus on quantitative cell biology, arguing that, “if seeing is believing, then measuring is knowing.” Topics of the issue's reviews span parts of the cell (including cell wall, cytoskeleton,…

POLAR-guided signalling complex assembly and localization drive asymmetric cell division (Nature)

In Arabidopsis, stomatal guard cells are specified following a set of conserved asymmetric cell divisions (ACDs), starting with a meristemoid mother cell. How do cells establish asymmetric divisions? Several proteins have been identified that are required for this, including BASL and POLAR, transcription…

Plant extracellular vesicles contain diverse small RNA species and are enriched in 10-17 nucleotide "tiny" RNAs (bioRxiv)

Small RNAs are known to move between cells and even between organisms. Studies in mammals have shown that extracellular vesicles (EVs) can contribute to small RNA transport, and recently small-RNA containing EVs were identified in plants. Baldrich et al. extend this work with an analysis of the types…