Image of the Day: Shoots Up

During plants’ cell division, mother cells give daughter cells a signal to show them which way is up.

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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.

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  • Ashley Yeager

    Ashley started at The Scientist in 2018. Before joining the staff, she worked as a freelance editor and writer, a writer at the Simons Foundation, and a web producer at Science News, among other positions. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT. Ashley edits the Scientist to Watch and Profile sections of the magazine and writes news, features, and other stories for both online and print.

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