The people behind the papers – Kenji Nagata and Mitsutomo Abe

The plant epidermis is a single layer of cells that forms a crucial barrier to the outside world, but the mechanisms that control epidermal differentiation – in particular the relative importance of position and lineage – remain incompletely understood. A new paper in Development tackles this question in Arabidopsis. To find out more about the story, we caught up with first author Kenji Nagata and his supervisor Mitsutomo Abe, Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo.