Fig. 1
Metabolic labeling of Arabidopsis cell wall-glycans with azido-monosaccharides. Arabidopsis is grown on MS containing an azido-monosaccharide such as Ac3ArabAz, which is taken up through the cell wall followed by hydrolysis of the acetyl (Ac) groups by intracellular esterases (1). The resulting ArabAz enters the glycan salvage pathway and is converted to an azido-nucleotide sugar donor (2) that allows its incorporation by glycosyltransferases into plant glycans (3) that end up in plant cell-surface glycans and its glycoproteins (4). Finally, the incorporated glycan can be imaged after a click-reaction with a fluorescent reporter group (5) (see Additional file 14 for high resolution)