Under salt stress guard cells rewire ion transport and abscisic acid signaling.

Soil salinity is an increasingly global problem which hampers plant growth and crop yield. Plant productivity depends on optimal water-use efficiency and photosynthetic capacity balanced by stomatal conductance. Whether and how stomatal behavior contributes to salt sensitivity or tolerance is currently unknown.

Phloem unloading in Arabidopsis roots is convective and regulated by the phloem-pole pericycle.

In plants, a complex mixture of solutes and macromolecules is transported by the phloem. Here, we examined how solutes and macromolecules are separated when they exit the phloem during the unloading process. We used a combination of approaches (non-invasive imaging, 3D-electron microscopy, and mathematical modelling) to show that phloem unloading of solutes in Arabidopsis roots occurs through plasmodesmata by a combination of mass flow and diffusion (convective phloem unloading).