Plant Growth Hormone

Predictive modelling of plant growth for food and fuel

A search for answers to the mysteries of plant development lies at the heart of research at the Sainsbury Laboratory, a newly opened institute that was made possible by an £82 million grant from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. In due course, the Laboratory will house 120 research scientists focused on the multifaceted events that unfold from the moment a single plant egg cell is fertilised.

Understanding plant development is both a fascinating and vitally important intellectual challenge, as Professor Elliot Meyerowitz, the Laboratory’s inaugural Director, explained: “The answers will not only enhance our fundamental understanding of life, they will also have important application to a critical problem that faces the world today - how to feed and fuel a growing population with limited resources of land, water and energy.”

More complicated than an aeroplane

Scientists know some of the structures involved in how a plant develops - the machinery for processing DNA information and the basis of cellular behaviour, for instance. Less is known about the complex communication network that exists across the plant as a whole. The movement of small molecules between cells effectively enables plant cells to ‘talk to each other’ during development and to react to their environment.

“Our work aims to understand how plants ‘read-in’ their environment and ‘read-out’ this information as particular patterns of growth and development,” said Professor Meyerowitz.

Take, for example, branching in plants: how does a plant know where and when to form a branch from its stem, and why does pruning make a plant bushier? Professor Ottoline Leyser, Associate Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory, discovered a hormone network that governs the process. Moving over long distances in the plant, the hormones provide a rich source of information that is then locally interpreted to regulate branching.

“It is this complex web of interaction that makes living organisms more than the sum of their parts,” added Professor Meyerowitz. “Even a small plant can have 10 million cells communicating in a whole variety of different modalities, chemical and physical. There may be 50 different types of plant cells, and each cell might have 30,000 different proteins that might associate and dissociate at millisecond scales, or even less.

How a Plant Growth Hormone Predicted by Darwin Shapes Plants « How ...

Auxin’s most well-known function is to stimulate cell elongation in young dicot stems via the acid growth theory .

It’s within this context of plant growth stimulation that auxin has been shown to mediate both phototropism and gravitropism in plants.

That is, auxin acts as the signal between the perception of light or gravity by the plant and the plant’s response . This response usually is more growth on one side of the stem or root, leading to the observed curvature.

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