The Geldner lab

Higher Plants are nature's other great experiment with complex, multi-cellular life. Yet, plants are so profoundly different from animals that one has to go down to the common unit of all life, the individual cell, in order to identify the common ground from which these two branches of life have evolved. At the level of the cell, plants and animals show an intriguing mixture of divergence and conservation. The development of a multi-cellular organism has apparently forced enormous increases in complexity onto pre-existing cellular structures and plants and animals have responded to this challenge in independent ways. It is these specific adaptations of plant cell structures to complex multi-cellular life that our lab is interested in, because we feel that it is key to an unbiased, mechanistic understanding of plant life.

The cellular aspect that our lab focuses on is the plant plasma membrane and its endosomal membrane system. We are especially interested in these membranes because they are crucial for communication between cells and for their association into ordered tissue layers and organs.

 For more information on our research, click here.

Wave lines were designed to highlight numerous different membrane compartments in the broadest possible range of tissues and organs of Arabidopsis. Many endosomal compartments have an inconspicuous appearance in live-imaging and therefore need to be defined by combinatorial co-localisation. The multi-color Wave line markers were generated to enable researchers to do such co-localisation in a fast and comprehensive fashion. For more information about these lines, click here.