Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. It’s built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin.

For the first time, high-resolution time-lapse videos of tiny bits of living plants show how they assemble their protective cell walls, researchers report March 21 in Science Advances. The image ...

A long series of experiments, beginning in 1956 and ending around 1980, established an outline of cell wall structure and demonstrated that penicillin inhibited one of the terminal steps in its ...

In particular, organelles called chloroplasts allow plants to capture the energy of the Sun in energy-rich molecules; cell walls allow plants to have rigid structures as varied as wood trunks and ...