A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently published a pioneering study that answers a central question in biology: how do organisms rally a wide range of cellular processes when they encounter a change—either internally or in the external environment—to thrive in good times or survive the bad times?
A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently published a pioneering study that answers a central question in biology: how do organisms rally a wide range of cellular processes when they encounter a change—either internally or in the external environment—to thrive in good times or survive the bad times? The research, focused on plants and published in Cell, identifies the interactions between four compounds: pectin, receptor proteins FERONIA and LLG1 and the signal RALF peptide. In particular, the team discovered that a molecular condensation process, called liquid-liquid phase separation, that occurs between pectin and RALF at the cell wall-cell membrane interface governs how a stimulus triggers many cellular processes. Together, these processes generate a response advantageous to the plant.
“Biologists often work linearly: we observe as a stimulus comes in, and then we monitor a specific response along a certain cellular pathway that we believe is behind that response. But in reality, cells maintain a multitude of pathways, which are carefully maintained and need to be coordinated all the time,” says Alice Cheung, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author.
Cheung and her long-time collaborator and co-senior author Hen-Ming Wu have contemplated the question of stimulus and response ever since they discovered back in 2010 and 2015 that the FERIONIA-LLG1 receptor pair is an ideal candidate to tease apart the challenging puzzle. FERONIA-LLG1 impacts almost all aspects of plant life – growth from a just-sprouted seedling to mature and reproducing the next generation, and sustaining all kinds of challenges in between, like diseases and climatic extremes.
Read more at University of Massachusetts Amherst
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