With our collaborators from Yingzhen Kong’s lab and Gongke Zhou’s lab, Natalie extended her PhD work by exploring how genetic suppressors of mur3 and ech mutants can restore polysaccharide secretion to the cell wall.

Wang, M.*, Xu, Z.*, Hoffmann, N.*, Guo, S., Dou, X., Wang, B., Su, Y., Qu, Y., Song, X., O’Neill, M. and Bjørk, P.K., Persson, S., Xu, Y., Wang, C., Wang, D., Kong, Y.#, McFarlane, H.E.#, and Zhou, G. (2026) LMBD2 interacts with components of the ECH/YIP complex and contributes to post-Golgi trafficking in Arabidopsis. The Plant Cell, 38: p.koag310.

https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koag310

Jordan and Heather recently wrote a review for Biochemistry and Cell Biology about how cell wall can be regulated by both active processes and passive forces.

Ferria, J. and McFarlane, H.E.# (2026) Passive and active regulation of cell wall mechanical properties. Biochemistry and Cell Biology.

https://doi.org/10.1139/bcb-2026-0156

Heather has been profiled in Trends in Plant Science as part of their “women in plant science around the world” series. She highlights the advantages to working in Toronto, including the excellent concentration of research and innovation in the GTA, and the supportive community of the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tplants.2026.07.009

Signal transduction often involves protein modification, and one common protein modification is ubiquitination. Using proteomics and mutant studies, we have discovered that a number of proteins are modified by ubiquitination during cell wall stress, and the one of these proteins, UBQ6, is required for plants to appropriately respond to cell wall stress. Congratulations to Yu Zhu who led this work as part of his PhD. Thanks also to our collaborators in  Berit Ebert’s lab at Ruhr University Bochum and to McFarlab members (Eduardo & Fabrizio) and McFarLab undergrads (Fayeza & Una) for their contributions to this work.

Zhu, Y., Ramírez Rodríguez, E.A., Chow, F., Azad, F.T., McNally, U., Kang, H.S., Ebert, B., and McFarlane, H.E.# (2026) Ubiquitination of the ribosomal-like domain of UBIQUITIN6 contributes to cell wall stress responses in Arabidopsis. The Plant Cell, 38: p.koag187.

https://doi.org/10.1093/plcell/koag187