What is it about?
Cells in living organisms communicate with their neighbours to work cooperatively during growth processes and adaptation to stress. Plants have microchannels connecting adjacent cells to facilitate this communication. We advance a hypothesis that signalling through the microchannels can be driven by a single cell, while an alternative route circumventing these channels exists as a mechanism to "democratise" decision-making and optimise energy use efficiency. The latter can be exploited to discover new genes controlling various plant processes.
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Photo by Bilal O. on Unsplash
Why is it important?
We propose the hypothesis that plant cells use a specific compartment (extracellular matrix) when "talking" to their neighbours to agree on a course of action after exposure to stress. The implications of this are (a) we can focus on the extracellular matrix to identify stress-regulatory components to better understand plant physiology and (b) that there is striking resemblance between quorum-sensing bacteria and plant cells than previously suspected. The latter opens new avenues of research and biotechnological applications.
Perspectives
This was the most difficult but yet very rewarding manuscript I have written so far. Assembling published evidence to support the key hypothesis required digging up old publications and poring over data in archived supplemental files. Reading these papers and realising what a marvellous treasure trove some of these forgotten papers are was an eyeopener. I now have a great appreciation of meta-analyses papers.
Stephen Chivasa
Durham University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Stress‐adaptive gene discovery by exploiting collective decision‐making of decentralised plant response systems, New Phytologist, October 2019, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/nph.16273.
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