Large-scale identification of potential phase-separation proteins from plants using a cell-free system

Biomolecular condensates have emerged as key players in cellular processes and responses to stress (Alberti and Hyman, 2021). Recent studies have revealed that most biomolecular condensates arise from liquid–liquid phase separation (Banani et al., 2017; Shin and Brangwynne, 2017), a process that has been described in the field of polymer chemistry. Although the investigation of phase separation has been carried out mostly in animal systems in the past decade, recent work has begun to reveal the importance of phase separation in plant biology (Fang et al., 2019; Powers et al., 2019; Emenecker et al., 2021).