Extracellular vesicles: a missing component in plant cell wall remodeling

In animal systems extracellular vesicles (EV) are known to transport cargo molecules from the cytoplasm to the extracellular compartment and they are the accepted vehicles for unconventional protein secretion. Plants have recently been shown to release EV into the apoplast and here we postulate a role in cell wall remodeling. Delving deeper into our proteomics data we found that much of the protein complement of EV from sunflower seedlings corresponds to cell wall-related proteins, including enzymes that participate in the degradation and reorganization of polysaccharides. Accumulated data implicate EV in the unconventional secretion of cell wall-modifying enzymes.