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As in all multicellular organisms, plants have adhesion molecules in their extracellular matrices (ECMs) that serve to maintain the integrity of the organism and to provide a scaffold for cell/cell communication. In flowering plants, adhesion molecules in somatic cells are produced by the secretory system at the cell plate during cell division (1) and in reproductive tissues, in the transmitting tract of the pistil that is formed from epidermal cells of the carpels (2). Until recently, no adhesion molecules were known for plants. The plant cell wall or ECM contains many polymers. The most abundant and best known is cellulose, but this well known polymer is embedded in a matrix of molecules called hemicelluloses and pectins. Pectins are likely to be implicated in adhesion because they occur in the middle lamella, the site of cell adhesion, and they are secreted from epidermal walls when carpel fusion occurs in formation of the transmitting tract. Both antibody localization data and genetic approaches have revealed only circumstantial evidence that pectins are adhesion molecules. De novo adhesion occurs in reproduction when pollen grains land on a stigma, when pollen tubes traverse the transmitting tract of the style, and when a sperm cell meets the egg cell during fertilization. An in vitro functional adhesion assay, produced by applying pollen tubes to the ECM molecules of the stylar transmitting tract (3), was used to isolate the adhesion molecules from the lily style. The matrix polymer identified as an adhesion molecule was a pectic polysaccharide (4). In this issue of PNAS, Iwai et al. (5) make use of an in vitro biological assay for adhesion to prove that pectin is the adhesion molecule binding somatic cells and that a previously uncharacterized pectin biosynthetic enzyme (a glucuronyltransferase) is a primary player in this adhesion event. This work is …

Plant cell adhesion: A bioassay facilitates discovery of the first pectin biosynthetic gene