Abstract
Positional information is crucial to determine cell fate, underlying basis of plant morphogenesis. Plasmodesmata constitute one pathway of such information, especially for transport of macromolecules. It is widely believed that plasmodesmata adjust their own size exclusion limit (SEL) to control intercellular movement of the signals, and accordingly play important roles for plant development.
To date, although spatio-temporal regulation of SEL has been proposed in several angiosperms, it remains largely unknown how the regulation of SEL influences developmental state of each cell.
We, therefore, decided to take advantage of a simple body plan of protonemata of the moss, Physcomitrella patens to approach this issue. Here we will report establishment of experimental systems: switching cell fate arbitrarily from proliferating to nonproliferating state and vice versa, and visualizing intercellular movement of macromolecles at a single cell level and at a certain cell cycle stage.
