Plant Science Colloquium with Prof. Dr. Gerd Jürgens

Plants do it differently than other eukaryotes such as animals and fungi. Rather than constricting the dividing cell and pinching off the remaining cytoplasmic bridge, plants produce the partitioning membrane by targeted secretion. This involves a specific membrane-fusion machinery which is assembled at the ER and activated at the plane of cell division. From an evolutionary perspective, this was not always the case but started from the re-use of an originally late-secretory fusion machinery. Only the flowering plants met their increased demand, which was caused by double fertilisation, by adding a more efficient fusion machinery to the existing one.