Can the bend of a banana give us insight into cancer? What does the shape of a rice grain have to do with infertility? The proteins that give plants their shape and structure are also involved in ...

Growing plant cells assemble a strong yet extensible nanofibrillar structure on their surface, the primary cell wall, which physically limits cell growth and defines cell size and shape. In this ...

The cell wall forms a boundary around every plant cell that protects the cell from stress and determines its expansion and shape. Pectins are highly conserved and abundant components of the primary ...

A new tool could make it easier to study scarce plant molecules. Researchers have developed so-called microbial cell factories -- using E. coli and yeast -- to produce a special class of plant ...

Arabidopsis plant with defective augmin (right and inset) does not grow compared to a control plant (left). Some weedkillers attack the augmin system. In plants, augmin is involved both in cell ...

Professor Bo Liu, Department of Plant Biology, holds an Arabidopsis plant while Professor Jawdat Al-Bassam, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, holds a model of the augmin protein complex.