The Plant Cell Wall, 2011 Methods and Protocols Methods in Molecular Biology Series, Vol. 715

The cell wall and its constituent polysaccharides and proteins control nearly all plant-based biological and biophysical processes. Understanding the cell wall is, therefore, not only fundamental to the plant sciences but is also pertinent to aspects of human and animal nutrition and health as well as plant-microbe and plant-animal interactions. In The Plant Cell Wall: Methods and Protocols, experts in the field describe detailed methods which are currently being applied to investigate the many aspects of the plant cell wall including its structure, biochemical composition, and metabolism.  The book delves into a range of techniques involving plant tissue culture, which can be applied to investigating cell wall structure and metabolism, methods directed towards structural analysis and occurrence of carbohydrates, the development and use of microscopy-based tools and techniques, procedures which measure the physical properties of the wall, and methods based on the application of molecular genetic approaches.  Written in the successful Methods in Molecular Biology? series format, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible protocols, and notes on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls.

Plant Tissue Cultures.- Computerized Molecular Modelling of Carbohydrates.- Oligosaccharide Mass Profiling (OLIMP) of Cell Wall Polysaccharides by MALDI-TOF/MS.- High-Voltage Paper Electrophoresis (HVPE) of Cell-Wall Building Blocks and Their Metabolic Precursors.- Carbohydrate Gel Electrophoresis.- Capillary Electrophoresis with Detection by Laser-Induced Fluorescence.- Monoclonal antibodies, Carbohydrate-Binding Modules, and the Detection of Polysaccharides in Plant Cell Walls.- Screening and Characterization of Plant Cell Walls Using Carbohydrate Microarrays.- Electron Tomography and Immunogold Labelling as Tools to Analyze de novo Assembly of Plant Cell Walls.- Analyzing Cellulose Biosynthesis with Confocal Microscopy.- Visual Mapping of Cell Wall Biosynthesis.- Atomic Force Microscopy of Plant Cell Walls.- Using Solid-State ¹³C NMR Spectroscopy to Study the Molecular Organization of Primary Plant Cell Walls.- Formation of Cellulose-Based Composites with Hemicelluloses and Pectins Using Gluconacetobacter Fermentation.- Structural Proteins of the Primary Cell Wall: Extraction, Purification, and Analysis.- New Insights into the Control of Cell Growth.- Extraction and Detection of Arabinogalactan Proteins.- Characterization of the Plant Cell Wall Proteome Using High Throughput Screens.- Knocking Out the Wall: Protocols for Gene Targeting in Physcomitrella patens.- Measuring In vitro Extensibility of Growing Plant Cell Walls.