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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 31/07/2026

Our lab fits into one mug... but only because it is a map! ☕🌍 The Cell Wall Dynamics team spans more than half of the Northern Hemisphere. Thanks to Simina, one of our undergraduate students, for this lovely reminder that science is built on people, ideas, and friendships that cross borders.

A white mug printed with a map of the Northern Hemisphere, showing Europe, North Africa and Asia. Small portraits mark the home countries of members of the Cell Wall Dynamics team, spanning from Spain to Iran. The mug holds a colourful bouquet of large handmade crepe paper flowers in shades of pink, lilac, blue and orange, sitting on a laboratory table.
People and countries here:
· Laura - Spain
· Bastien - France
· Demetrio - Italy
· Klaudia - Poland
· Simina - Romania
· Nasrin - Iran

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 23/06/2026

Heading to the #ICAR2026 poster session today 18:00–19:00? Make sure to visit @manju-mhj.bsky.social at #A095! Find out how we are using cutting-edge tools like Brillouin microscopy and O-PTIR to capture the earliest stages of plant cell wall integrity 🌿🔬 (Catch her Thursday at the same time too!)

Manju Maharjan, with long dark hair and glasses, smiles warmly while gesturing toward her scientific poster at the ICAR 2026 conference. The poster is titled "Watchers on the Wall: Decoding the Early Stages of Plant Cell Wall Integrity" and displays research from Umeå University and UPSC, showcasing methods like Brillouin Microscopy and Optical Photothermal InfraRed Spectroscopy to study plant cell wall mechanics.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 18/06/2026

Poster session today 15:45–16:15 at #CellWall2026. come find our very own Klaudia Ordyniak at PO9_11! Mild stress or real damage? Find out how ZAT11 and ZAT18 help plants tell the difference 🌿

Klaudia Ordyniak standing beside poster PO9_11 at the XVII Plant Cell Wall Meeting, Porto. The poster is titled “Mild Stress or Real Damage? The Role of ZAT11 and ZAT18 in Cell Wall Defense” and presents data on transcription factor responses to cell wall integrity signalling, including Brillouin microscopy and THE1 expression analyses. Klaudia is smiling and pointing to the poster.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 07/06/2026

Congratulations Manju, a PhD student at Cell Wall Dynamics lab and the team Umeå for securing the first position at the EC2U Science Contest 2026 in Turku🏆🎉 The science contest is a part of EC2U forum that brings researchers from several fields to showcasing science through teamwork and creativity.

Manju Maharjan (on the left) presenting a 3D printed Arabidopsis root in a science contest as her personal item. For her, it is special because Arabidopsis root is her study material for the PhD project and it is also the result of collaboration between the research team in Heinrich-Heine University in Germany and Microscopy Platform at UPSC.

Team Umeå celebrating after winning the first place at the Science Contest.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 21/05/2026

And what better opponent than the brilliant Yoselin Benitez-Alfonso @yoselin.bsky.social who joined us all the way from Leeds for both Klaudia’s seminar and yesterday’s invited talk! A truly intense and inspiring week for the lab 🌱 (2/2)

Prof. Yoselin Benitez-Alfonso (left) and Klaudia Ordyniak (right) sit at the seminar table during the opponent discussion. Behind them, the acknowledgements slide of Klaudia’s presentation is projected, showing the Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab group photo and logos of Umeå University, UPSC, NTNU, and Kempestiftelserna.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 21/05/2026

Another highlight this week in the Cell Wall Dynamics Lab: our PhD student Klaudia Ordyniak nailed her half-time seminar today at @umeaplantsciencecentre.se Presenting her work on transcriptional regulation of Cell Wall Integrity signalling, so proud! 🎉 (1/2)

Klaudia Ordyniak stands beside a projected title slide for her Half-Time Seminar, dated 21st May 2026, Umeå. The slide shows a partially visible title about transcriptional regulation of Cell Wall Integrity signalling, with the Umeå University and Umeå Plant Science Centre logos. She holds a laptop and wears a white jacket.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 20/05/2026

And to close the day, we’re watching live the EC2U Science Contest from Turku, with our PhD student Manju representing the Umeå delegation on stage! Go Manju! 🏆🔬 (3/3)

A TV screen displays a live broadcast of the EC2U Science Contest from Turku. Manju in a pink Umeå University t-shirt holds a microphone and a bottle on stage. A countdown timer shows 0:27 alongside the question “The extinction of which animal would have the most severe consequences for current human life?” Of course bees, otherwise we wouldn’t have orange juice (and many other things!). Let it bee! 🐝

UPSC members sit in the fika room watching the EC2U Science Contest live broadcast on a wall-mounted screen. The screen shows multiple contestants in coloured t-shirts on a stage, with a question about the ideal city for mental and physical well-being displayed alongside a countdown timer reading 0:38.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 20/05/2026

Then we had the pleasure of hosting an excellent invited seminar by Prof. Yoselin Benitez-Alfonso @yoselin.bsky.social from the University of Leeds. A fantastic talk on cell walls, plasmodesmata and callose. So great to have you in Umeå! 🌱 (2/3)

Prof. Yoselin Benitez-Alfonso stands at the front of a lecture hall beside a projected introductory slide for the Benitez-Alfonso Lab (University of Leeds), describing research on cell wall and plasmodesmata regulation for sustainable biotechnology.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 20/05/2026

Very busy day in the Cell Wall Dynamics lab today! We started with our master’s student Sehyeon Kim defending a brilliant Master’s thesis at @umeaplantsciencecentre.se. Congratulations Sehyeon! 🎉

Sehyeon Kim stands beside a projected “Thank you all!” slide showing group photos of the lab team, with the Umeå Plant Science Centre and SLU logos visible. He is smiling, hands clasped, in a light denim jacket.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 02/01/2026

Where this goes next: biochemical and biophysical assays to test what these ectodomains bind, plus better profiling of algal wall composition. And look for the standalone equivalents of the composite ectodomains in plants. Predictions are useful, but binding and function decide the story. 🧪

Graphical abstract with three panels linking green algae receptor-like kinases (RLKs) to cell wall integrity (CWI) sensing. Left: aquatic scene with diverse Chlorophyta forms and a label “34 Chlorophyta species analysed”. Centre: computer screen labelled “Sequence AND Structure” (sequence text and a protein structure under a magnifying glass), with “736 putative RLKs identified” and “5× increase over previous counts”. Right: “CWI sensing molecular toolkit” showing algae with “composite ectodomains” built from modules labelled Lectin, LRR, and LysM, and a question about whether these ectodomain modules interact in plants, illustrated with Arabidopsis thaliana and separate module blocks marked with question marks.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 02/01/2026

The time-calibrated phylogeny panel puts RLKs on an evolutionary timeline and shows their relative abundance across green lineages. It helps frame which receptor features may be old, and which may be lineage-specific. ⏳🌱

Figure 4 from Marcianò, Dauphin et al., 2026. Time-calibrated phylogeny and relative abundance of receptor-like kinases (RLKs) across representative green lineages. The tree shows estimated divergence times in million years, aligned with major geological eons, eras, and periods. For each species, the bar on the right indicates the proportion of RLKs among all kinase-domain–containing proteins. Divergence times are based on published molecular clock estimates; taxa lacking reliable calibration data were excluded.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 02/01/2026

Here we can see an example of a “bipartite” ectodomain that combines an LRR-like region with lectin-like features, which could couple peptide and glycan perception in a single receptor.

Figure 3B from Marcianò, Dauphin et al., 2026. The bipartite organization of putative RLK A0A9D4TVN9 (blue) with corresponding region overlapping to the Arabidopsis thaliana LRR-receptor BRI1 (red; PDB entry: 4m7e) and the fucose-binding lectin from Morone saxatilis (yellow; PDB entry: 3cqo). The graphical views below protein structures display annotated domains along the protein sequence, combining domain predictions from pLM-BLAST with structural matches identified via Foldseek; Residue ranges for each domain are indicated in brackets.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 02/01/2026

Chlorella vulgaris became our case study: 36 RLKs, with 13 containing LRRs, and Foldseek predicts 12 ectodomains with folds close to Arabidopsis LRR-RLKs.

Light micrograph showing many Chlorella vulgaris (NIES-2170) cells in the field of view. Obtained via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 02/01/2026

The top functional groups were carbohydrate-active enzymes (32.6%) and cell wall anchoring/adhesion (22.1%), followed by signalling-related modules, proteases, interaction domains, and carbohydrate-binding domains. This diversity hints at many ways to “read” the wall. 🧱🔬

Figure 2 from Marcianò, Dauphin et al., 2026. A comparative analysis reveals 7 distinct functional groups in newly-identified RLK's ectodomains. (A) Predictions obtained through Foldseek and pLM-BLAST analyses on RLK's ectodomain from Nine Chlorophyta species were sorted into 7 functional groups according to their biological role or function. Pie charts show the percentage of annotated regions corresponding to a given entry both grouped together and mapped for each species (B) Annotated regions having Carbohydrate active enzyme moieties that contained glycosyl hydrolases (GH), transferases (GT) or lyases. (C) Annotated regions having Carbohydrate binding domain moieties (including different lectin families and pectinesterase-related binding domains). The overall distribution shows distinct CBD features in a species dependent manner (Adair et al. 1987; Spain and Funk 2022; Poulhazan et al. 2024). Others: Metal binding and oxidoreduction; Defense; Apoptosis; Viral-related proteins.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 02/01/2026

We screened available UniProt proteomes covering 34 Chlorophyta species and identified 736 sequences that fit RLK criteria. Earlier work reported 137, so this is a large jump in coverage! 📈

Figure 1A from Marcianò, Dauphin et al., 2026. Phylogenic tree for selected species, based on NCBI taxonomy browser. Note that C. dessicata has recently been reclassified as Nannochloris dessicata and its lineage is not as clear, sharing closer ancestry with Auxenochlorellae (Sanders et al. 2022). And number of putative RLKs identified using the pipeline presented in this study (blue), against the number of RLKs identified in previous studies (in yellow) (Yin et al. 2024) (Liu et al. 2024) (Gong and Han 2021).

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 02/01/2026

We first defined the basic receptor layout: an extracellular part outside the cell, a membrane segment, and an intracellular kinase. We built a #Bioinformatics pipeline that searches for that full logic taking into consideration both sequence and structure 💻🧬

Figure 1A from Marcianò, Dauphin et al., 2026. Using available proteomes from Chlorophyta species, protein sequences containing the kinase-like domain were extracted and subsequently filtered through DeepTMHMM (Halgren et al. 2022). Sequences with predicted signal peptide and at least one transmembrane domain were subjected to 3D structure prediction using AlphaFold3, and the predicted extracellular region (i.e., ectodomain) was selected for further analyses. The identification of functional domains present in the ectodomains was performed through Foldseek and pLM-BLAST tools to gain overall insight on protein function.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 11/09/2025

🎉 Proud moment for our lab! PhD student Klaudia Ordyniak won the Best Poster Award at the #SPPSPhD2025 conference for her work on transcription factors ZAT11 & ZAT18 in cell wall integrity 🌿👏 Also cheers to another UPSC colleague, Julie Ducla, for winning Best Presentation! bit.ly/46xCUZZ

Klaudia and Julie after receiving their awards.

Klaudia with her poster. Klaudia’s poster, “Stress-Proofing Plants: The Role of ZAT11 & ZAT18 in Cell Wall Defense”, told the story of two transcription factors, ZAT11 and ZAT18, as central players in the cell wall integrity (CWI) pathway. Her work revealed that these transcription factors do not act in isolation: they regulate each other’s expression and influence the activity of the CWI receptor THESEUS1, a key node in translating wall damage into cellular responses. By combining RNA-seq data, mutant analysis, and stress assays, she showed how ZAT11 and ZAT18 respond differently to stresses such as salt and cellulose inhibition, offering new insight into how plants fine-tune their defences while maintaining growth.

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Plant Cell Wall Dynamics Lab @cellwalldynamics.com · 28/03/2025

And continuing with conference news—postdoc Bastien Dauphin just gave a great talk at the UK Plant Biomechanics Conference 2025 🎤🌿 He’s using chemo-optogenetics to trigger local changes in the plant cell wall. New tools, new insights! #PlantBiomechanics #CellWallDynamics #Optogenetics

Bastien Dauphin during his presentation at the UK Plant Biomechanics Conference 2025. Thanks Yoselin Benitez Alfonso for the picture :)

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