Recent Posts

Casparian strip formation at root endodermal and non-endodermal cell layers in rice

Zhang et al. investigate the role of the OsCIF1/2–OsSGN3a/b signaling pathway in Casparian strip formation in rice. https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koad269 By Jixing Xia, of Life Science and Technology, Guangxi University, China. Background: The Casparian strip (CS) is a belt-like lignin-based…

Novel lignin-based extracellular barrier in glandular trichome

This is a fascinating story by Hao et al., which takes us from phenotype to novel insights by looking at glandular trichomes in cucumber. Cucumber fruits often have a silica-based white powder deposited on their surface, but this is missing from the yellow green peel (ygp) mutant. Staining shows that…

A dirigent protein complex directs lignin polymerization and assembly of the root diffusion barrier

In Latin, dirigere means “to align or guide”, so in 1997 when a protein was identified that guides the stereoselectivity of another enzyme it was named as a dirigent protein. Subsequent studies found that the Arabidopsis genome encodes 25 dirigent proteins (DPs). In this new work, Gao et al. characterized…