Our header picture: A main focus of our work are the Casparian strips, depicted in the background from the original drawing of the German botanist Robert Caspary, who first described this cell type in the roots of vascular plants. Our work attempts to shed new light onto this old structure by revealing the mechanism whereby the precise ring-like depositions of cell wall are achieved. The zoom in depicts our current model of how the CASPs act as scaffold proteins, bringing an NADPH oxidase into proximity of specific peroxidases, thereby achieving tight spatial control over the polymerization of lignin that forms the Casparian strip. For more information on this, see our publication by Lee et al. in Cell.
