Calcium transporters: From fields to the table

Calcium transporters regulate calcium fluxes within cells. Plants, like all organisms, contain channels, pumps and exchangers to carefully modulate intracellular calcium levels. This review presents a summary of the recent advances in cloning and characterizing of these transporters and highlights their putative roles in calcium signaling. Two themes pervade this review: Yeast molecular genetic analysis is a robust tool to study the function of plant transporters and there is a lack of evidence directly linking plant calcium transport mutants with alterations in calcium signaling. We conclude this review by discussing how plant transporters are being engineered to improve the calcium content of agriculturally important plants.