Huge thanks to Co-first author Lea Berg and to the amazing supervisors Heike Lindner and @michaelraissig.bsky.social (the OG BdMUTE fan!). Also big thanks to Tiago, Babara and Melanie starting this journey in Heidelberg so we could continue at @unibern.bsky.social

Finally, we saw that the dose-dependent rescue of GC and SC formation in sid/bdmute-1 by 3xGFP-BdMUTE was mirrored in a gradual complementation of stomatal physiology - linking once more SC presence and GC morphology to the improved kinetics of graminoid stomata. (7/8)

In intermediate lines, we saw stomata with 0, 1 or 2 SCs. In complexes with only 1 SC,GCs that lacked a SC did not form proper dumbbell shape. The GC flanked by the SCs, however, formed a better dumbbell. Thus, SC presence influenced GC morphogenesis independent of BdMUTE. (6/8)

In weak lines, SCs were not recruited but GC abortion fully rescued. This seemed to correlate w/ rescue of skewed divisions in dev. GCs w/o requiring SC recruitment, suggesting a cell-autonomous role in division plane orientation in GMCs that does not require SC recruitment (5/8)

Even though strong lines almost fully rescued sid/bdmute-1, we were able to show that BdMUTE with reduced mobility resulted in severely delayed SC recruitment in the strong lines indicating that BdMUTE mobility is indeed required to recruit SCs. (4/8)

Strikingly, we found a broad range of expression strengths in the mobility impaired BdMUTE complementation lines. The stronger the line was expressed, the better it rescued the mutant sid/bdmute-1 phenotype (3/8)

We used a set of sid/bdmute-1 complementation lines with functional, mobile BdMUTE (single YFP-tagged) and BdMUTE with impaired mobility (triple GFP-tagged) to untangle roles in the two independent cell lineages (2/8)