Tag: Cell Biology

Plant metabolism varies substantially between developmental stages, cell types, and intracellular environments. Similarly, biochemical responses to abiotic stress often deviate between neighboring cell types, but discerning what is changing where becomes more challenging in smaller and more fragile sub-compartments. …

In their perspective article, “Life on the dry side: a roadmap to understanding desiccation tolerance and accelerating translational applications,” Marks et al. outline the current state and future promise of desiccation tolerance research. They define desiccation tolerance as “the ability to dry…

Cells are as small as life gets, but can be much larger than they appear if given room for expansion. This is possible with expansion microscopy, a technique that enables three dimensional cell imaging by physically expanding cellular components for visualization. Although expansion microscopy has been…

How can we precisely image plant tissues in super-resolution when approaching the optical limits of conventional microscopes? One solution lies in expansion microscopy, a technique that embeds tissue samples in an expandable hydrogel that proportionally increases the distances between structures, allowing…

Membrane contact sites (MCSs) serve a critical role in intracellular communication, particularly between organelle membranes, enabling direct molecular transfer. Less clear is the role MCSs play in intercellular communication. New evidence from Pérez-Sancho et al. implicates plasmodesmata in this function…

Environmental stimuli, such as drought and salinity, alter cellular conditions including apoplastic pH (pHApo) in plants. These stimuli often lead to an elevation in pHApo which is closely associated with cell functions and plant growth. However, the mechanism behind is largely unexplored. A recent study…

Imagine you’re on a quest to deliver a package, racing against the competition. How do you prepare? Pollen grains and the pollen tubes that they form are essentially package-delivery systems. Their purpose is to deliver genetic information (sperm cell nuclei) to the ovule. Once the task is completed,…

Plasmodesmata are important for intercellular communication in plants. They are formed through incomplete cytokinesis during which there is no “final cut” of the communication between daughter cells. Unlike animal cells that have a single bridge between cells, plants create several hundreds of plasmodesmata…