2001: AN OVERVIEW

Among the papers published in the European Journal of Histochemistry in 2001, several deal with plant cells. Personally, as a cell biologist mainly working with animal cells, I have always been fascinated by plant cells: the images of those beautiful nuclei are not only something to look at and marvel at. In the past few years, important indications of cell structure and function have come from plant cytology and cytochemistry (see e.g. Medina et al., 2000). Along this line, Lingua and coworkers (2001) described the changes that occur after arbuscular mychorizal fungi colonization, which can induce a strong increase in metabolism. Nuclear changes can also be induced by pathogens, as in Licopersicon esculentum (Lingua et al., 2001). In the same issue, we find other interesting papers: Balestrazzi et al. (2001) have studied the expression of DNA topoisomerase I in Daucus carota: the elucidation of the expression pattern of this gene is important in the evaluation of its physiological functions. In another paper, Bianciotto et al. (2001) studied the association of arbuscular mychorrizal fungi with rhizobacteria, which are commonly used as biopesticides and biofertilizers: the anchoring between fungi and bacteria occurs by means of extracellular polysaccharides. This could be of relevance for the production of inocula with a stable fugus-bacteria association.