Invasive cells in animals and plants: searching for LECA machineries in later eukaryotic life

Invasive cell growth and migration is usually considered a specifically metazoan phenomenon. However, common features and mechanisms of cytoskeletal rearrangements, membrane trafficking and signalling processes contribute to cellular invasiveness in organisms as diverse as metazoans and plants - two eukaryotic realms genealogically connected only through the last common eukaryotic ancestor (LECA). By comparing current understanding of cell invasiveness in model cell types of both metazoan and plant origin (invadopodia of transformed metazoan cells, neurites, pollen tubes and root hairs), we document that invasive cell behavior in both lineages depends on similar mechanisms. While some superficially analogous processes may have arisen independently by convergent evolution (e.g. secretion of substrate- or tissue-macerating enzymes by both animal and plant cells), at the heart of cell invasion is an evolutionarily conserved machinery of cellular polarization and oriented cell mobilization, involving the actin cytoskeleton and the secretory pathway. Its central components - small GTPases (in particular RHO, but also ARF and Rab), their specialized effectors, actin and associated proteins, the exocyst complex essential for polarized secretion, or components of the phospholipid- and redox- based signalling circuits (inositol-phospholipid kinases/PIP2, NADPH oxidases) are aparently homologous among plants and metazoans, indicating that they were present already in LECA.

This article was reviewed by Arcady Mushegian, Valerian Dolja and Purificacion Lopez-Garcia.