Symplast/Apoplast/Protoplast

[Una Smith]

Nigel, for some reason, the email address in the header
of your posting appears to be incomplete.  You might want
to consider adding your correct email address to your
signature file.

nigel at pathos writes:

> Trust me.. if Don had meant to say "individual", you would have heard  
him.

You appear to know Don Kaplan.  Would you mind elaborating on what
you know of his current research?  What does he think is the
individual in the plant kingdom?

> The basic idea is that the plant is made up of the symplast and the  
apoplast.
> Where symplast = all the cytoplasm in all the cells; interconnected by 
> plasmodesmata (like gap junctions in animals).  
> 
> The appoplast on the other hand is all the stuff outside the plasma  
membrane...
> all the "dead" stuff. (You know, like cell walls and xylem elements)

I understood the definitions used in Niklas and Kaplan's paper,
but I did not understand the full implications of their use of
Organismal rather than Cell Theory.  They must have a very good
reason for arguing that plants should be looked at as a whole
structure rather than the result of a history of differentiation
and growth events.  This is a very different perspective from
the usual one nowadays.

The business about multinucleated early embryonic plant cells
has always bothered me, as does what I know of the hyphal-body
stage of fungal growth, so I am extremely intrigued by the 
approach that Kaplan has taken.

	Una