Introduction In plants as in animals, K+ channel activity is the major determinant of cell membrane conductance [1,2]. Kt channels are therefore involved in central physiological processes such as setting the resting cell membrane potential, transducing signals and shaping action-potential waveforms. In addition, in plant cells, K t channel activity is thought to be involved in long-term fluxes...

The plant cuticle is an extracellular hydrophobic layer that covers the aerial epidermis of all land plants, providing protection against desiccation and external environmental stresses. The past decade has seen considerable progress in assembling models for the biosynthesis of its two major components, the polymer cutin and cuticular waxes. Most recently, two breakthroughs in the long-sought m...

, 1611 (2013); 339 Science et al. Laura A. Burkle Co-Occurrence, and Function Plant-Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. clicking here. colleagues, clients, or customers by , you can order high-quality copies for your If you wish to distribute this article to others here. following the guidelines can be obtained by Pe...

Aspartic proteinases of the A1 family are widely distributed among plant species and have been purified from a variety of tissues. They are most active at acidic pH, are specifically inhibited by pepstatin A and contain two aspartic residues indispensible for catalytic activity. The three-dimensional structure of two plant aspartic proteinases has been determined, sharing significant structural...

The plant vascular system, composed of xylem and phloem, evolved to connect plant organs and transport various molecules between them. During the post-embryonic growth, these conductive tissues constitutively form from cells that are derived from a lateral meristem, commonly called procambium and cambium. Procambium/cambium contains pluripotent stem cells and provides a microenvironment that ma...

Metabolite profiling is a fast growing technology and is useful for phenotyping and diagnostic analyses of plants. It is also rapidly becoming a key tool in functional annotation of genes and in the comprehensive understanding of the cellular response to biological conditions. Metabolomics approaches have recently been used to assess the natural variance in metabolite content between individual...

Signaling photoreceptors use the information contained in the absorption of a photon to modulate biological activity in plants and a wide range of organisms. The fundamental-and as yet imperfectly answered-question is, how is this achieved at the molecular level? We adopt the perspective of biophysicists interested in light-dependent signal transduction in nature and the three-dimensional struc...

From seeds, forms emerge, growing and evolving and interacting with each other and with their environment to produce what we see when we walk into a garden, a field or a forèst. As these plants provide resources such as fard for us to eat, timber for us to build with and fibre to clothe ourselves with, it is important to understand how they grow. Computational mortels can provide a theoretical ...

New and exciting developments in boron research in the past few years greatly contributed to better understanding of the role of boron in plants. Purification and identification of the first boron-polyol transport molecules resolved much of the controversy about boron phloem mobility. Isolation and characterization of the boron-polysaccharide complex from cell walls provided the first direct ev...