When plants encounter cell wall stress, they must presumably fortify the plant cell wall by synthesizing and secreting additional cell wall components. Our new paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany directly tests this hypothesis using live cell imaging and electron microscopy of plant samples across a range of cell wall stresses. We found that changes to cell wall integrity results in a rebalancing of the endomembrane system to promote secretion over endocytic trafficking. This work was led by recent McFarLab PhD awardee Natalie Hoffmann, with important contributions by MSc student Eskandar Mohammad, and is now featured on the cover of the JXB Special Issue on Exocytosis.
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