Abstract
The plant cell walls surrounding all plant cells are highly dynamic structures, which change their composition and organization in response to chemical and physical stimuli originating both in the environment and in plants themselves. They are intricately involved in all interactions between plants and their environment while also providing adaptive structural support during plant growth and development. A key mechanism contributing to these adaptive changes is the cell wall integrity (CWI) maintenance mechanism. It monitors and maintains the functional integrity of cell walls by initiating adaptive changes in cellular and cell wall metabolism. Despite its importance, both our understanding of its mode of action and knowledge regarding the molecular components that form it are limited. Intriguingly, the available evidence implicates mechanosensing in the mechanism. Here, we provide an overview of the knowledge available regarding the molecular mechanisms involved in and discuss how mechanoperception and signal transduction may contribute to plant CWI maintenance.
Highlights
The perception of plant cell walls by the scientific community has changed dramatically in recent years
We briefly introduce relevant components of plant cell walls, followed by a short summary of the knowledge available regarding the cell wall integrity (CWI) maintenance mechanism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. cerevisiae), for the reason that the understanding of this simpler system can serve as food for thought regarding the processes in plants
We focus on a subset of cell wall polysaccharides that have been previously implicated in CWI maintenance, and discuss processes taking place mainly in primary cell walls in Arabidopsis thaliana, since most of the available information derives from this model plant
Summary
The perception of plant cell walls by the scientific community has changed dramatically in recent years. Cell wall plasticity has been identified as one of the reasons for this, because it can apparently neutralize the effects of introduced genetic modifications to a significant extent [2,3] These results imply the existence of a mechanism capable of detecting the effects of the introduced modifications and initiating compensatory responses to neutralize them [4]. We briefly introduce relevant components of plant cell walls, followed by a short summary of the knowledge available regarding the CWI maintenance mechanism in Saccharomyces cerevisiae (S. cerevisiae), for the reason that the understanding of this simpler system can serve as food for thought regarding the processes in plants. We close by discussing how the different mechanisms can contribute jointly to CWI maintenance, providing a short perspective on open questions and future challenges in this context
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