Olive fruits at the green, cherry and black stages were used to investigate the structural and microstructural changes in tissues during ripening. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) tissue fracture of green olives resulted in cell wall breakage of epicarp and mesocarp cells. Tissue fracture resulted in fewer broken cells in cherry than in green olives and even less in black olive tissues. Cell ...

Plant cell walls are composed of structurally diverse polymers, many of which are O-acetylated. How plants O-acetylate wall polymers and what its function is remained elusive until recently, when two protein families were identified in the model plant Arabidopsis that are involved in the O-acetylation of wall polysaccharides - the reduced wall acetylation (RWA) and the trichome birefringence-li...

Oligosaccharide Mass Profiling (OLIMP) allows a fast and sensitive assessment of cell wall polymer structure when coupled with Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionisation Time Of Flight Mass Spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS). The short time required for sample preparation and analysis makes possible the study of a wide range of plant organs, revealing a high degree of heterogeneity in the substitutio...

The primary cell wall of higher plants consists of a mixture of polysaccharides whose spatial proximities and interactions with each other are not well understood. We recently obtained the first two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional high-resolution magic-angle-spinning (13)C solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectra of the uniformly (13)C-labeled primary cell wall of Arabidopsis thali...

The composition of cell walls in cereal grains and other grass species differs markedly from walls in seeds of other plants. In the maternal tissues that surround the embryo and endosperm of the grain, walls contain higher levels of cellulose and in many cases are heavily lignified. This may be contrasted with walls of the endosperm, where the amount of cellulose is relatively low, and the wall...

Rhamnose is required in Arabidopsis thaliana for synthesizing pectic polysaccharides and glycosylating flavonols. RHAMNOSE BIOSYNTHESIS1 (RHM1) encodes a UDP-l-rhamnose synthase, and rhm1 mutants exhibit many developmental defects, including short root hairs, hyponastic cotyledons, and left-handed helically twisted petals and roots. It has been proposed that the hyponastic cotyledons observed i...

Lectin-mediated interactions between oral viridans group streptococci and actinomyces may play an important role in microbial colonization of the tooth surface. The presence of two host-like motifs, either GalNAc beta1-->3Gal (Gn) or Gal beta1-->3GalNAc (G), in the cell wall polysaccharides of five streptococcal strains accounts for the lactose-sensitive coaggregations of these bacteria with Ac...