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" Rojas-Pierce and colleagues examined the homotypic fusion and vascular protein sorting, or HOPS, complex of proteins.

Our lab is starting to elucidate molecular mechanisms of vacuole dynamics that may contribute to responses of plants to these environmental cues.

"Vacuoles fuse together when stomata open as they are exposed to light, and then they come apart or fragment to close the stomata when it is dark," Rojas-Pierce, associate professor of plant and microbial biology at NC State and the corresponding author of a paper describing the research, said.

We use chemical and classical genetic approaches to characterize these mechanisms in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

image: Accumulation of the HOPS subunit VPS41 at the vacuole membrane where it overlaps with the membrane marker SYP22.

, Plasma Processes and Polymers 2021• , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2018• "Phosphoinositides control the localization of HOPS subunit VPS41, which together with VPS33 mediates vacuole fusion in plants" Authors: Carla Brillada, Jiameng Zheng, Eliezer Rovira-Diaz and Marcela Rojas-Pierce, North Carolina State University; Falco Kruger, Jana Christin Askani and Karin Schumacher, Heidelberg University Published: Aug.

The current study also showed that the curvature of the vacuolar membranes may play an important role in their fusion in plants.

Plants die if vacuoles fail to develop properly.

Furthermore, we provide evidence for genetic interactions between VPS41 and VTI11 SNARE that regulate vacuole fusion, and the requirement of a functional SNARE complex for normal VPS41 and VPS33 localization.

She added that this system is similar in other eukaryotes, or organisms with a cell nucleus.

Dynamics of vacuole fusion are also important for critical physiological functions such as the regulation of stomata closing during water deficit and gravitropism.

, Botany, University of California 2003 B.