Dissection Of Plant Cell Walls By High-Throughput Methods

The structural complexity and heterogeneity of plant cell walls presents major obstacles to understanding the precise role of their constituent polysaccharides in plant growth and development. Further complexity is added as cell wall structures are modulated during plant development and in response to environmental cues. A variety of techniques have been developed to help advance our understanding of cell wall structures, and functions. Recent advances in immunocytochemistry, monosaccharide composition and linkage analysis, MALDI-TOF oligosaccharide fingerprinting and carbohydrate microarrays now provide cell wall biologists with powerful, robust and in some cases high-throughput tools for accurately determining cell wall structures. This chapter covers some of the latest developments in cell wall analysis, and also explores the prospects for effectively integrating different analytical platforms.