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Abstract
This article comments on: Abu-Abied M, Belausov E, Hagay S, Peremyslov V, Dolja V, Sadot E. 2018. Myosin XI-K is involved in root organogenesis, polar auxin transport and cell division. Journal of Experimental Botany 69, 2869–2881 .
Highlights
Two types of myosins are present in green algae and land plants, myosin VIII and myosin XI, but in land plants each type is represented by a small gene family (Nebenfuhr and Dixit, 2018)
The authors found additional phenotypes: myosin 3KO plants show striking division-plane orientation defects in the stele, milder defects of the same type in endodermal/epidermal cells of the root meristem, and an increase in the time cells spend in mitosis and cytokinesis.There had been little evidence that myosin XI is involved in auxin signalling and cell division, and so the paper contributes a significant step forward in our understanding of myosin XI function in vascular plants
I suggest comparing a set of phenotypes with the spokes of a wheel: a priori we know only about one causal relationship, which is the lack of a protein as the basis for all the separate phenotypes observed.The establishment of further causal relationships needs careful experimental testing
Summary
Plant myosin XI motors are renowned for their function in cytoplasmic streaming. But the cell biology of myosin XI has taken an unexpected turn as a study by Abu-Abied et al (2018) suggests a role of the motor in auxin transport and cell division plane alignment. The authors found additional phenotypes: myosin 3KO plants show striking division-plane orientation defects in the stele, milder defects of the same type in endodermal/epidermal cells of the root meristem, and an increase in the time cells spend in mitosis and cytokinesis.There had been little evidence that myosin XI is involved in auxin signalling and cell division, and so the paper contributes a significant step forward in our understanding of myosin XI function in vascular plants As exciting as these novel phenotypes may be, it is not that easy to put them into a simple coherent model. In another recent paper, Sun et al (2018) observed a similar localization of a myosin XI paralogue to cell plates of the moss Physcomitrella
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