Image of the Day: Shoots Up

ABOVE: A fluorescent PIN auxin transporter, PIN2 (magenta), appears only in the top part of plant cells.
MATOUŠ GLANC

Plant cells inherit their sense of up and down from their mother cells, researchers reported December 3 in Nature Plants. The team used a line of transgenic Arabidopsis plants to track fluorescent PIN auxin transporters—which influence plant cells’ sense of direction—and found that mother cells communicated the direction of up and down to their daughter cells, but exactly how is unclear. The experiments also showed how wrongly placed transporters were destroyed and new ones were generated and inserted into the correct part of the cell membrane.

M. Glanc et al. “Mechanistic framework for cell-intrinsic re-establishment of PIN2 polarity after cell division,” Nature Plants, 4:1082–88, 2018.