Identification of the plant cell wall components interacting with wak receptors

The WAK (wall associated kinases) project concerns the study of signal perception by membrane receptors connected to different components of the extracellular matrix surrounding plant cells. These receptors are believed to act as relays perceiving changes in the plant cell wall and transducing these informations to the plant cell. These receptors contain an extracellular domain that binds cell wall polymers, and an intracellular kinase domain.
The aim of this study consists in the identification, by different cellular and molecular techniques, of the exact nature of the cell wall polymers interacting with the extracellular domain. The coding sequences of the extracellular domains were cloned and over-expressed in bacteria and yeast. These tools will be used as probes to identify the polysaccharidic fractions of the cell wall able to bind to the WAK receptor.
This study will help us, first, to have a better understanding of how a plant senses and responds to environmental changes, and second, to modulate these responses by plant transformation.