On the cover: Stomatal apertures are regulated by the changes in guard cell volume which have been associated with vacuolar structures. To investigate the contribution of guard cell vacuoles to stomatal movement, Tanaka et al. (in this issue, pp. 1159-1169) performed the three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction of guard cell vacuoles in a transgenic Arabidopsis line expressing GFP-AtVAM3 visualizing vacuolar membranes (VMs). The cover photograph shows the process of 3-D reconstruction via the connection of neighboring contours extracted from VM fluorescence (upper images, left to right) and rotated views of reconstructed 3-D model (lower images). The 3-D images showed a large, topologically-connected vacuole. During stomatal closure, the guard cell vacuole kept a continuous structure even when it became convoluted.
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