Published by Oxford University Press [2007] on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology
Preface
This Special Issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany (JXB) contains ten invited papers from a session on Compartmentation in Plant Cells held at the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) Annual Meeting at the University of Kent at Canterbury in April 2006. These papers review the specialized functions of cellular compartments, focusing on recent advances in our understanding of their structure, biogenesis and co-ordination of their activities. It complements previous JXB Special Issues on Cellular Compartmentation of Plant Metabolism (Bowsher CG, Walker RP, Tobin AK, JXB 52, 513–652, 2001) and Making Sense of the Metabolome (Burrell M, Smirnoff N, JXB 56, 219–336, 2005).The Special Issue begins with a review by Aaron Richardson and Jeffrey Palmer of the role of horizontal gene transfer in the evolution of nuclear, chloroplast and, especially, mitochondrial genomes. David Logan then describes the mitochondrial compartments and presents the plant cell mitochondrial population as a ‘discontinuous whole’ that must fuse and separate to maintain the integrity of mitochondrial DNA. The dynamic nature of intracellular organelles is also captured in Enrique López-Juez's descriptions of the diverse and specialized roles of plastids in plant cell biology, and the interplay between plastid and nuclear genomes required to optimize the biochemistry of cells with contrasting physiological functions. The structure of the plant cell nucleus and the exchange of macromolecules between nucleoplasm and cytoplasm are described by Iris Meier, whilst John Lunn provides an insight to the evolution of metabolic pathways that are partitioned between mitochondrion, chloroplast, and cytosol, and the regulatory networks that have evolved for their control. Three papers address the mechanisms and control of membrane trafficking in plant cells and explore its roles (i) in distributing lipids and proteins to target membranes per se and (ii) in regulating cell growth and developmental processes through the distribution of specific macromolecules. Patrick Moreau and colleagues present our knowledge of membrane trafficking through the plant ER–Golgi interface. They describe the similarities and differences between the ER–Golgi interface in plant cells and that in other eukaryotes, and offer a challenge to plant scientists to determine how these might impact on membrane trafficking. Prisca Campanoni and Mike Blatt reveal how membrane trafficking supplies the lipid and protein necessary for the rapid polar growth of root hairs and pollen tubes, and suggest that membrane trafficking could co-ordinate these processes by regulating the turnover and activity of ion channels. In a complementary paper, Alice Cheung and Hen-Ming Wu describe the cytosolic architecture required for cell expansion and suggest how ionic gradients might interact with the actin cytoskeleton and vesicle trafficking to effect the polar growth of pollen tubes. A perspective on the heterogeneity of acidic compartments in plant cells is presented by Enrico Martinoia and colleagues, who discuss their role in cytoplasmic homeostasis, detoxification and metabolism. Finally, Setsuko Komatsu and colleagues describe some novel approaches to catalogue the proteomes of plant cell membranes and argue that knowledge of the unique protein complement of cellular membranes will allow further insight to the specialized functions of membrane-bound compartments.
We thank the SEB, the SEB-Plant Transport Group and JXB for their financial support, and the JXB staff, especially Mary Traynor, Jane Basterfield, and Raquel Gonzalez-Cuesta, for helping us solicit and edit these papers. We hope that you enjoy them as much as we did.
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