The right motifs for plant cell adhesion: what makes an adhesive site?

Cells of multicellular organisms are surrounded by and attached to a matrix of fibrous polysaccharides and proteins known as the extracellular matrix. This fibrous network not only serves as a structural support to cells and tissues but also plays an integral part in the process as important as proliferation, differentiation, or defense. While at first sight, the extracellular matrices of plant and animals do not have much in common, a closer look reveals remarkable similarities. In particular, the proteins involved in the adhesion of the cell to the extracellular matrix share many functional properties. At the sequence level, however, a surprising lack of homology is found between adhesion-related proteins of plants and animals. Both protein machineries only reveal similarities between small subdomains and motifs, which further underlines their functional relationship. In this review, we provide an overview on the similarities between motifs in proteins known to be located at the plant cell wall—plasma membrane—cytoskeleton interface to proteins of the animal adhesome. We also show that by comparing the proteome of both adhesion machineries at the level of motifs, we are also able to identify potentially new candidate proteins that functionally contribute to the adhesion of the plant plasma membrane to the cell wall.