In his 1881 book, The Power of Movement in Plants, Darwin described a now classic experiment in which he directed a tiny shaft of sunlight onto the tip of a grass seedling. The region below the coleoptile tip subsequently curved toward the light, leading to the notion of a transmissible growth stimulus emanating from the tip. Two generations later, follow-up work by the Dutch plant physiologist...

Cell wall proteins play key roles in cell structure and metabolism, cell enlargement, signal transduction, responses to environmental stress, and many other physiological events. Agricultural crops are often used for investigating stress tolerance because cultivars with differing degrees of tolerance are available. Abiotic and biotic stress factors markedly influence the geographical distributi...

Asingle intraperitoneal injection of bacterial cell walls derived from groupA streptococci (SCW)' into susceptible rats results in the development of acute and chronic erosive polyarthritis (1, 2) . The pathology of the lesion leading to joint destruction has been shown to be aT cell-dependent, cell-mediated response to the deposition of the group A streptococcal peptidoglycan-polysaccharide po...

UNLABELLED The fungal cell wall confers cell morphology and protection against environmental insults. For fungal pathogens, the cell wall is a key immunological modulator and an ideal therapeutic target. Yeast cell walls possess an inner matrix of interlinked β-glucan and chitin that is thought to provide tensile strength and rigidity. Yeast cells remodel their walls over time in response to en...

To clarify the mechanisms of cell wall construction, we used a proteomic approach to investigate the proteins secreted into cell wall spaces during cell wall regeneration from the protoplasts of Arabidopsis suspension-cultured cells. We focused on cell wall proteins loosely bound to the cell wall architecture and extractable with 1 M KCl solutions from: (i) native suspension cultured cells; (ii...