Biomolecular condensates: Regulatory hubs for plant iron supply

Iron is a micronutrient for plants. Biologists from the Institute of Botany at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) describe in a study, which has now been published in the Journal of Cell Biology, that regulatory proteins for iron uptake behave particularly dynamically in the cell nucleus when the cells are exposed to blue light—an important signal for plant growth. They found that the initially homogeneously distributed proteins relocated together into "biomolecular condensates" in the cell nucleus shortly after this exposure.