The adhesion of plant cells is vital for support and protection of the plant body and is maintained by a variety of molecular associations between cell wall components. In some specialized cases, though, plant cells are programmed to detach, and root cap-derived border cells are examples of this. Border cells (in some species known as border-like cells) provide an expendable barrier between roo...

Brachypodium distachyon L. Beauv. (Brachypodium) is a species that has become an excellent model system for gaining a better understanding of various areas of grass biology and improving plant breeding. Although there are some studies of an in vitro Brachypodium culture including somatic embryogenesis, detailed knowledge of the composition of the main cell wall components in the embryogenic cal...

HRGPs4 are a diverse family of cell wall proteins including extensins, hydroxyproline-rich lectins of the Solanaceae, and arabinogalactans (7, 8). HRGPs can comprise as much as 15% of the cell wall dry weight. Pathogen-induced accumulation ofextensin-like HRGPs and the correlation ofincreased cell wall HRGP with increased pathogen resistance are documented (3, 4). The precise function of HRGPs ...

Extensins are cell wall basic glycoproteins with a polypeptide backbone that is extremely rich in hydroxyproline. In this paper, the function of extensins in embryo development was studied in Nicotiana tabacum. By using Western blot and immunohistochemistry, the extensin JIM20 epitopes were found to express in different developmental stages of embryos, and specifically in the top of the embryo ...

A previously undescribed forward chemical genetic screen using hydrolases affecting the extracellular matrix is introduced. The developed screen takes advantage of the power of chemical genetics and combines it with the known substrate specificity of glycosylhydrolases, resulting in the selection of conditional mutants that exhibit structural defects in their extracellular matrix. Identificatio...

A novel extensin gene has been identified in soybean (Glycine max L.) that encodes a hydroxyproline-rich glycoprotein (SbHRGP3) with two different domains. In this study expression of SbHRGP3 was investigated during soybean root development. SbHRGP was expressed in roots of mature plants, as well as seedlings, and showed a distinct pattern of expression during root development. The expression o...