Bulletin No. 1, 2013

40 Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2013 Unconventional Protein Secretion in Plants P rof. Jiang Liwen , professor in the School of Life Sciences, has proven that plants secrete protein in unconventional ways that had previously been ignored by the research community. He also discovered the organelle responsible for such secretion. What Was Known Conventionally in plants, protein secretion or exocytosis is achieved via a secretory pathway involving several organelles in the plant cells. This method of secretion depends on the proteins having a signal peptide aka leader peptide, which is a string of amino acids that acts like a GPS navigation system, guiding the protein into the first organelle of this pathway—the endoplasmic reticulum, before it journeys from organelle to Prof. Jiang Liwen thinks the Satellite Remote Sensing Ground Receiving Station of the Institute of Space and Information Science on campus looks like a typical transport vesicle termed clathrin coated vesicle (CCV). Photo by Keith Hiro