Talking through walls: Signaling in plant development

Plants spend their entire life cycles rooted in one place. Thus, plant development, like the real estate business, is largely driven by location, location, location. A seedling emerges, perceives the hormonal and light signals that control its vegetative and reproductive development, finds and utilizes soil bound nutrient sources, and fends off hostilities wrought upon it by changing abiotic conditions and by pathogens. The mechanisms by which plant cells receive physiological stimuli and transduce these into the cell are the central focus in many areas of plant biology. Laboratories are homing in on molecular mechanisms involved in hormone signaling, light reception, disease resitance, and nitrogen fixation. A Cold Spring Harbor Symposium called Signaling in Plant Development, which met from September 27 to October 1, 1995, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was organized by Venkatasen Sundaresan (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York), June Nasrallah (Cornell University, Ithaca, New York), and Nam-Hai Chua (Rockefeller University, New York) to detail these advances. Several surprising strategies in control of signal transduction highlight what continues to be an exciting time in plant biology research.