Essay 16.

1
Division Plane Determination in Plant Cells
Laurie G. Smith, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California,
San Diego

As illustrated in Figure 2, a phragmoplast is composed of short microtubules and

actin filaments organized into two parallel, interdigitating discs. In most dividing
cells, where cytokinesis immediately follows mitosis, the phragmoplast arises from
the mitotic spindle between daughter nuclei immediately after mitosis, and then
expands radially to complete the formation of the cell plate (Figure 2). Cell plate
formation depends most critically on the microtubule component of the
phragmoplast (Gunning, 1982). Phragmoplast microtubules appear to direct the
kinesin-driven transport of Golgi-derived vesicles containing cell wall components
to the phragmoplast equator (Otegui et al., 2001), where they fuse with each other,
eventually coalescing to form a new cell wall sandwiched between new plasma
membranes (Samuels et al., 1995). A variety of proteins have been implicated in
the membrane fusion events involved in cell plate formation, including a dynaminlike GTPase and several components of a SNARE complex (Assaad, 2001; Verma,
2001). In addition, cell plate formation has recently been shown to be regulated by
a MAP kinase cascade (Nishihama and Machida, 2001).