Tag: Cell Walls

Plant cell walls provide mechanical support to plant cells, determine their size and shape, and influence plant development and stress responses. The plant cell wall is composed mainly of polysaccharides, including cellulose, hemicellulose and pectins, with smaller amounts of phenolic polymers and proteins…

Cellulose is an indispensable component of plant cell wall formation. Cellulose is synthesized at the plasma membrane by a cellulose synthase complex (CSC) made up of at least 18 monomeric cellulose synthases (CESAs). In this study, Huang et al. used a chemical genetic approach to explore the structure…

Madeleine Seale Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3RB, United Kingdom [email protected] ORCID: 0000-0002-8924-3943 Wood formation occurs via radial proliferation of vascular cambium cells and the deposition of secondary cell wall layers…

Plant cell walls are one of the great engineering feats of nature, providing immense structural strength and durability. The core components of plant cell walls (pectin, hemicellulose, and cellulose) can occur in different proportions and vary in their structure and assembly, thus allowing cell walls…

Sugarcane is one of the major crops for sugar and ethanol production and has been successfully used for first generation ethanol production through sucrose fermentation, but second generation ethanol production, through cell wall depolymerization, is still limited. Aerenchyma formation in sugarcane root…

Plant grafting is an agricultural technique that joins plant tissues (e.g., the shoot and root) to confer beneficial traits from one plant to another. Although interfamily grafting is difficult in general, Notaguchi et al. found that Nicotiana benthamiana (Nb) has a strong potential to graft with phylogenetically…

During seed formation, the developing embryo becomes covered with a water-impermeable cuticle. Several Arabidopsis mutants have been identified that are defective in cuticle formation and provide a framework for how it is formed. Doll et al. have added a missing piece to this puzzle. Briefly, embryo…

Genetic contribution of paleopolyploidy to adaptive evolution in angiosperms Comparative genomics has revealed that the angiosperms have experienced numerous whole-genome duplications (WGD), which have been proposed to have contributed to their global dominance. Following WGD, many of the…