Weibing Yang

Cool story from @meristemania.bsky.social lab on growth-defense tradeoff at the shoot apical meristem www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thank you Arif for the highlight!

Excited to share our latest review on hydrosignaling: moisture-dependent molecular pathways that help plants grow towards water. Insightful review of the literature and discussion of moisture sensing mechanisms by Will Dwyer and @hhtormar.bsky.social. Enjoy!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Evolution and development: What makes a merry stem? From tiny mosses to giant redwoods, around 450,000 species of land plants show a huge variety of forms, yet all land plants develop from stem cells in proliferative meristems. What makes a meristem? T...

It was good to catch up on my reading for this dispatch in Current Biology. Sjoerd Woudenberg in the Weijers lab, Wallner et al. In the Dolan lab and Flores Sandoval et al. In the Bowman lab have done a great job! Evolution and development: What makes a merry stem?: www.cell.com/current-biol...

🧵 Just out in Cell after more than 10 years in the making!

🎓 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Plants and animals evolve radically different body plans.

Do they also operate under fundamentally different molecular evolutionary constraints during organ formation?

@cellpress.bsky.social

At the end of 2024 I did a chronological round up of all the #plantscience in @science.org that year.
So how did 2025 pan out? This year, I’m grouping papers thematically instead of chronologically so read on to find out what exciting plant science came out over the last 12 months. (1/22)

Left: the shoot apex of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant. Right: the shoot apical meristem. Actively dividing stem cells are shown in green, and the cell walls are labelled in magenta.

Congratulations to researchers from the CAS-JIC-TSL Centre of Excellence for Plant and Microbial Science (CEPAMS) who have revealed a novel mechanism that controls plant stem cell dynamics through precise spatial patterning of cell wall modification.

Did you ever wonder how a dividing cambium cell looks like and what determines its striking regular division? Xiomin Liu, PhD student in the lab, found out in a heroic histological approach. Fruitful collaboration with the group of Sabine Müller (@phragmoplast.bsky.social) doi.org/10.64898/202...

I’m very happy to share that next year I’m launching the Meristem Hydraulics Group. We will be at the @umeaplantsciencecentre.se (Sweden) & the University of Helsinki (Finland) @helsinki.fi

Here is a brief description of our research interests:
www.upsc.se/juan_alonso_...

#PlantSciences

I had a great time writing this dispatch @currentbiology.bsky.social about Jacob Suissa's recent paper on the link between fern phyllotaxis and vascular architecture. "Evo–devo: Ferns flourished due to developmental covariance between leaves and vasculature"
authors.elsevier.com/a/1mH793QW8S...

Thank you Minya!

Thank you Ali!

Thank you Sarah!

Thank you Jim!

Thank you Bob!

Thank you Sebastián!

Thank you Arif!

Thank you very much Jennifer!

Thank you Jose! I have just forwarded the full manuscript to you.

Thank you to all authors and collaborators on this project. This work would not have been possible without your hard work, insights, and fantastic teamwork.

Finally, five additional PME mRNAs were found to localize in the nucleus, and this bimodal pectin methylesterification is seen across several plant species. We propose that spatiotemporal cell wall patterning regulates stem cell dynamics and shoot meristem development.

During cell division, nuclear envelope breakdown (NEBD) releases PME5 mRNA for translation in the cytoplasm, driving active demethylesterification of new cross wall pectins, whereas nuclear sequestration of PME5 mRNA maintains high methylesterification in the surrounding walls.

Nuclear sequestration of protein-coding mRNA is unusual. But PME5 is not alone: our prior work also revealed nuclear localization of CDC20 and CCS52B (plant CDH1 ortholog) mRNAs, both encoding key cell cycle regulators (www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...).

During the analysis of pectin modification, we found that mature wall is highly methylesterified while new cross wall is de-esterified. We discover that PME5, which removes the methyl group, is only expressed in dividing cells, and its mRNA is strictly sequestered in the nucleus.

Recently we showed that CSLD5 proteins, together with CESAs, rapidly accumulate at the cell division plane, contributing to robust wall synthesis and cell plate formation (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

About a decade ago we began to look at the walls of stem cells by systematically analysing the expression patterns of glycosyltransferase (GTs) genes and polysaccharide composition in the shoot apical meristem (SAM） (www.cell.com/current-biol....

Cell wall patterning regulates plant stem cell dynamics The plant cell wall regulates development through spatiotemporal modulation of its chemical and mechanical properties. Pectin methylesterification is recognized as a rheological switch controlling wal...

Thrilled to have our paper out in @science.org. Cell division guides plant cell wall formation. Does the reverse hold? We show that bimodal pectin methylesterification, via PME5 mRNA nuclear sequestration, influences plant cell division and cell plate orientation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Cell wall patterning regulates plant stem cell dynamics The plant cell wall regulates development through spatiotemporal modulation of its chemical and mechanical properties. Pectin methylesterification is recognized as a rheological switch controlling wal...

Out in @science.org this week:
PME5 is sequestered in the nucleus and released during cytokinesis allowing its activity to be timed with cell division.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#PlantScience
#PlantSci

Thanks a lot Juan.

KATANIN promotes cell elongation and division to generate proper cell numbers in maize organs Microtubule severing is essential for proper eukaryotic cell elongation and division. Here we show that the microtubule severing protein, KATANIN, is encoded by two genes in Zea mays (maize) called Di...

Excited to share this preprint on the microtubule severing protein Katanin, and its role in cell elongation and division in maize. First author Stephanie Martinez worked collaboratively with many folks to bring you this preprint. Check it out! 🔬🌽 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...