Plant vacuoles have a variety of functions, as such they have diverse material transport routes to vacuoles. However, there are still many unexplained aspects as to how these various transport routes evolved and what kind of regulation they are under.
In the current research, a research team led by Professor Takashi Ueda of the National Institute for Basic Biology has shown that a plant-specific vacuole transport pathway is controlled by CORVET, one of the tethering factors acting in the transport pathway to the vacuole.