Laura Bacete at FASEB “Mechanisms in Plant Development” 2025, Southbridge, USA
Representing the Plant Cell Wall Dynamics lab, I presented our integrative approaches to deciphering cell wall integrity, highlighting how plants use mechanics as a “language” to regulate growth and development.
NEWS
Laura Bacete
8/29/20251 min read
At the FASEB Science Research Conference on Mechanisms in Plant Development (24–28 August, Southbridge, Massachusetts), I gave a talk titled “Integrative Approaches to Deciphering Cell Wall Integrity in the Green Lineage.”The presentation outlined our lab’s efforts to understand how plants sense, encode, and decode information from their cell walls.
I explored the idea of cell wall integrity (CWI) as a communication system:
Writing signals through controlled perturbations, such as optogenetic wall enzymes (work by Bastien Dauphin, with contributions from Simina Bratu).
Propagating signals via artificial walls (work by Manju Maharjan, who just started in the lab, building over results from our 2024 summer students Gaia, Nisanur and Jaime).
Reading signals with advanced imaging, including Brillouin microscopy (for stiffness “pronunciation”) and Raman/O-PTIR spectroscopy (for compositional “vocabulary”).
Several case studies from our group illustrated how wall cues are integrated:
Rapid changes in tissue mechanics, detected within minutes (work by Laura Bacete and Nasrin Sabooni).
Early transcriptional responses mediated by transcription factors such as ZAT11 and ZAT18 (work by Klaudia Ordyniak, with contributions from Sehyeon Kim).
Cell cycle regulation by wall status, revealing mechanochemical checkpoints (work by Nancy Soni).
Evolutionary conservation of putative CWI receptors across the green lineage, including Chlorophyta (work by Demetrio Marcianò, Bastien Dauphin and collaborators; see preprint 10.5281/zenodo.15051144).
I concluded by proposing a path “towards a dictionary of plant mechanics”: defining the alphabet of mechanical cues (stiffening, softening, strain), mapping the grammar of receptor and transcription factor interactions, and ultimately building a dictionary that links specific mechanical signals to developmental outputs.
The FASEB meeting offered a vibrant forum to discuss how developmental biology and cell wall research intersect — and it was a pleasure to showcase how our lab’s combined toolkit is helping to uncover the language of plant cell walls.