About the Cover
On the Cover: A photo of a Physcomitrella green gametophyte branch with an orange sporophyte growing on top. Insert is a photo of a gametophyte cell after transient expression of a DNA construct encoding BiP-RFP (endoplasmic reticulum [ER] marker, shown in red) and oleosin-GFP (marker of oil bodies and synthesized on extensive regions of the ER, shown in green). All the spherical oil bodies (green) are connected to the ER network (orange-yellow) in the cell. In this issue, Huang et al. (pp. 1192–1203) establish the use of Physcomitrella as a transient expression system to study the cell biology of lipid synthesis and storage. No other plant transient expression system containing storage oil bodies has been reported previously. The moss is the most primitive plant containing higher-plant-like storage oil bodies. Its single-cell-layer gametophyte can be easily transformed and observed with confocal microscopy and induced to mutate via homologous recombination.
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Copyright © 2009 by the American Society of Plant Biologists
