The plot thickens:: new perspectives of primary cell wall modification

Recent studies have further confirmed the ubiquity of cell wall restructuring during plant growth and development, and have emphasized the fact that our understanding of the breadth of molecular processes that mediate wall modification is still rudimentary. In the past few years, both enzymatic and non-enzymatic agents that apparently contribute to wall disassembly have been identified, and it is likely that additional mechanisms will continue to be revealed. These discoveries are being propelled by the development of new biochemical and biophysical assays, by database mining in the wake of the explosion of plant sequence information from genome sequencing and expressed sequence tags, and by a variety of strategies used to catalog the cell wall proteome. The daunting question of how these mechanistically diverse and complex processes are coordinated remains unresolved.