Towards Building a Plant Cell Atlas

Abstract

Enormous societal challenges, such as feeding and providing energy for a growing population in a dramatically changing climate, necessitate technological advances in plant science. Plant cells are fundamental organizational units that mediate the production, transport, and storage of our primary food sources, and they sequester a significant proportion of the world's carbon. New technologies allow comprehensive descriptions of cells that could accelerate research across fields of plant science. Complementary to the efforts towards understanding the cellular diversity in human brain and immune systems, a Plant Cell Atlas (PCA) that maps molecular machineries to cellular and subcellular domains, follows their dynamic movements, and describes their interactions would accelerate discovery in plant science and help to solve imminent societal problems.

Keywords: Plant Cell Atlas; data science; imaging; nanotechnology; proteomics; single-cell profiling.