New Approaches for Studying and Exploiting an Old Protuberance, the Plant Trichome

New possibilities for old protuberances (Botanical Briefing)

This review of plant trichomes by Wagner et al. (pp. 3-11) reveals new opportunities for their manipulation. These offer the potential to enhance pest and disease resistance, to exploit trichomes as factories for molecular farming, as systems for understanding cellular differentiation and cell shape determination, and for expanding understanding of the many suspected functions of trichomes and related surface protuberances.