An international team of scientists has found the first step in how a plant builds new cell walls: the assembly of a scaffold made of structural proteins.

The discovery is based on Thale Cress, the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced. Scientists also created a library with mutated copies of every gene, which helped the team find which proteins are critical to cell wall formation.

Unlocking the secrets of how plants build cell walls could lead to engineered plant-based materials and help in other studies of self-assembling proteins.