In the past decade, many plant genomes have been completely sequenced ranging from unicellular alga to trees. This rich resource of information raises questions like: How did specific transporters evolve as early plants adapted to dry land? How did the evolution of transporters in monocot plants differ from that in dicots? What are the functional orthologs in food and energy crops of transporters characterized in model plants? How do we name the new genes/proteins? Phylogenetic analyses of transport proteins will shed light on these questions and potentially reveal novel insights for future studies to understand plant nutrition, stress tolerance, biomass production, signaling and development.
We encourage the community to participate in this effort as ~5% of plant genomes encode proteins with predicted transport roles. A. thaliana with a genome size of 135 Mb has over a thousand genes classified as transporters, while the genomes of other flowering plants can be 2 to 7 times larger. To coordinate this community effort, we encourage interested individuals or groups to submit an abstract proposal describing the focus of their planned project and the family or families of transporters to be studied. Whenever possible, provide the TC (transport classification) name or number ( www.tcdb.org). Please see list of all At transporters (Table 1) at http://www.clfs.umd.edu/CBMG/faculty/sze/lab/AtTransporters.html (from Bock K et al. 2006. Plant Physiol. 140, 1151).
Submit a proposal by email to one of the host editors. Please include a provisional title, full author list, and format the subject of your email as: "[Research Topic title] –Your Name".
The abstract proposal will be reviewed and a response will be rendered within ~1 week. Specific guidelines for the article will be provided.
We look forward to your proposals and contributions, and thank you for making this Research Topic a valuable and useful resource.

Topic Host Editors:
Angus Murphy Transport & Trafficking murphy@purdue.edu
Heven Sze Plant Physiology hsze@umd.edu

This topic is also being hosted in Frontiers in Plant Transport and Traffic to ensure a wide range of contributions.

Submit your idea

Impact

Frontiers in Plant Science

Participating Journals

Impact