Cell shape development in plants

Abstract

The shape of a plant cell has long been the cornerstone of diverse areas of plant research but it is only recently that molecular-genetic and cell-biological tools have been effectively combined for dissecting plant cell morphogenesis. Increased understanding of the polar growth characteristics of model cell types, the availability of many morphological mutants and significant advances in fluorescent-protein-aided live-cell visualization have provided the major impetus for these analyses. The cytoskeleton and its regulators have emerged as essential components of the scaffold involved in fabricating plant cell shape. In this article, I collate information from recent discoveries to derive a simple cytoskeleton-based operational framework for plant cell morphogenesis.