12/29/2023 0 Comments Cell polarity![]() ![]() This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grant F32 GM133102-01), UC San Diego, Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Bergmann is also a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford Cancer Institute, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Yan Gong and Kensington Hartman, a staff research associate at UC San Diego are co-authors of this work. “How do you get all these plants that make really cool specialized cells-cells that make interesting shapes, cells that make interesting chemicals, cells that respond to certain stimuli? And can we engineer that to happen?” “Exactly how the polarity complex works is something we still need to figure out,” said Bergmann. Now that the researchers know how this manager works, they can determine its role in upstream and downstream processes-and figure out ways to harness its power. To investigate how these proteins work, the team developed plant cell lines that expressed fluorescent versions of polarity complex and cytoskeletal proteins, then spent hundreds of hours in a dark room, including at the Nikon Imaging Center at UC San Diego, tracking the glowing proteins’ movements while cells grew, divided and repeated.Īn image depicts how microtubules (green) are organized in leaf cells (outlined in magenta). “We knew those proteins were involved in division, but we didn't know how they controlled the process at the molecular level.” “Stem cells use these polarity proteins to decide where to divide,” said Muroyama. Polarity complexes help dividing leaf stem cells orient themselves. Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences professor of biology, began this work by investigating polarity complexes-little clusters of proteins that are critical in each cell to build leaves of the proper size and shape. Researchers in the Stanford lab of Dominique Bergmann, the Shirley R. “I have a similar hope that improving our understanding of how stem cells divide in plants might inform engineering applications in the future.” Blocking wall construction by threatening catastrophe Planar cell polarity (PCP), the coordinated orientation of structures such as cilia, mammalian hairs or insect bristles, depends on at least two molecular systems. “Understanding how stem cells divide in animals has been important for understanding various human diseases and has impacted translational medicines,” said Muroyama, a new faculty member in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. The new finding could help researchers to engineer plants that are more adaptable to changing environments-a critical task as the world continues to face climate change. “Instead of using the cytoskeleton to say, ‘divide this way!’ the plants said, ‘ don’t divide this way!’” said Andrew Muroyama, a former postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, current assistant professor at UC San Diego’s School of Biological Sciences and the lead author of the paper. ![]()
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