The plant cell wall is not a passive box around the cell but a structure the cell reads. Because it is a composite material, its chemistry, mechanics, and structure are not three separate properties but three views of a single mechanochemical state, continuously edited as cells grow, differentiate, and respond to their environment. This has consequences for how we study it: a measurement that isolates one property characterises a phase rather than a wall, and a single time point misses the editing itself. It also has consequences for how we think about signalling. Diverse perturbations of the wall converge on a common set of downstream responses, which leaves open the question of how distinct outcomes arise at all. In this talk, I will present different examples of how cell wall changes that appear similar can carry two different messages. Specificity may therefore reside in the integrated state of the wall rather than in composition, receptor identity, or damage magnitude alone. I will develop this view and its methodological demands, and use it to argue for a new frame for cell wall mediated signaling: that wall changes can be treated as a language, encoded by a cell reporting its own state and decoded by the cell that responds, whose response then rewrites the message.
11/09/2026
Venerdì 11 settembre 2026 ore 9:30
Aula B “Tecce”- Ed. Fisiologia Generale CU026
P.le Aldo Moro, 5 Roma
"From Cell Wall State to Cellular Decisions: Early decoding of mechanochemical cues"
Prof. Laura Bacete Cano
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Umeå University
Umeå, Sweden
Info: simone.ferrari@uniroma1.it