Why is it important to understand how metabolism is comparmentalized between plant tissues?
The aim of this article is to show how immunohistochemistry, in conjunction with biochemical and physiological studies, is useful in understanding both the function of an enzyme in a tissue and metabolic processes occurring in plant tissues. Complex plant structures such as leaves, fruit and roots are composed of a number of different tissues which in turn contain several types of cell. The metabolic processes occurring within these different tissues and cells are likely to vary greatly and an understanding of this is important to both understanding the metabolism of the plant structure and the role of individual enzymes within it. A good example of this is the compartmentation of photosynthetic processes between the mesophyll and bundle sheath in leaves of C4 plants (Hatch et al., 1975; Edwards et al., 2001). However, in many plant structures our understanding of how metabolic processes are comparmentalized between different tissues is poor. Perhaps a reflection of this is the fact th
