Single-Cell and Spatial Perspectives on Source-Sink Dynamics in Plants.

Single-cell and spatial omics reveal that cellular heterogeneity influences source strength, transport interfaces, and sink development in plant carbon allocation.

• Why it matters: Understanding how diverse cell populations contribute to source-sink dynamics is crucial for improving crop resilience and productivity, addressing limitations of traditional tissue-level studies.
• What they did: The review synthesizes insights from single-cell transcriptomics, spatial transcriptomics, and multi-omics approaches to explore how cellular diversity and spatial organization shape plant carbon processes, especially under stress.
• The result: Findings suggest that future crop strategies may focus on cell-type-specific engineering of transport and metabolic sinks, enabled by integrating high-resolution molecular data with modeling and machine learning.