There is great interest in developing new catalytic methods to transform biomass to advanced liquid biofuels that are easily integrated with existing infrastructures for storage, transport, and end use. A major challenge for this new bioenergy economy is to engineer new energy crops with modified cell walls that are optimal for catalytic conversion. One important challenge is to engineer cell walls so that plant tissues more easily disassemble, reducing the energy costs associated with thermochemical pretreatment. Another important goal is to design the chemical properties of plant cell walls so they are optimized for catalytic conversion to liquid fuel. A lack of knowledge about the fundamental mechanisms of cell wall assembly limits our chances for success in both of the areas above. Our approach is to use the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, to begin to unravel the complexity of cell wall assembly and the physical connections between cells. Arabidopsis provides a useful physiology of cell wall assembly, a growing collection of useful mutants, and the ability to use a variety of imaging modalities to learn how, when, and where key events in the cell wall assembly process occur. In this poster we will describe some of our work that uses the lobed pavement cells of the dicot leaf to understand how cytoskeletal elements such as microtubules and actin filaments can be locally stabilized to dictate the patterns of cellulose synthesis and secretion. We also will describe the use of Arabidopsis and maize mutants to learn how intracellular systems can affect secretion and the physical interactions between cells in the context of a tissue.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Chunhua Zhang; Peter Ciesielski; Maureen C McCann; Bryon Donohoe; Mike Himmel; Dan Szymanski (2011), "Cytoplasmic control of cell wall assembly and cell-cell adhesion ," http://c3bio.org/resources/450.

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