A better understanding of the development and architecture of roots is essential to develop strategies to increase crop yield and optimize agricultural land use. Roots control nutrient and water uptake, provide anchoring and mechanical support and can serve as important storage organs. Root growth and development is under tight genetic control and modulated by developmental cues including plant...

The evidence that FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) protein, and its paralog TWIN SISTER OF FT, act as the long-distance floral stimulus, or at least that they are part of it in diverse plant species, has attracted much attention in recent years. Studies to understand the physiological and molecular apparatuses that integrate spatial and temporal signals to regulate developmental transitions in plants have...

The Cholodny-Went hypothesis holds that gravitropic curvature of a growing plant organ depends on regulated transport of the plant hormone auxin; new studies of the agravitropic mutant aux1 of Arabidopsis provide strong evidence in support of this hypothesis.

Plant growth is tightly controlled through the integration of environmental cues with the physiological status of the seedling. A recent study now proposes a model explaining how the plant hormone ethylene triggers opposite growth responses depending on the light environment.

The plant hormone auxin is central to the regulation of growth and development. Recent work has demonstrated that auxin signalling depends on targeted protein degradation, and in the past year this model has been strengthened. The focus is now on identifying the targets of this degradative pathway, determining how auxin influences the degradative process and linking the turnover of specific pro...

Brassinosteroids (BRs) are plant hormones with versatile roles. Among other functions, the BRs control cell elongation, division, and differentiation events (Gudesblat and Russinova, 2011), fulfill roles in adaptive growth processes (Wang et al., 2012; Fridman and Savaldi-Goldstein, 2013), and participate in abiotic and biotic stress responses (Kagale et al., 2007; De Bruyne etal., 2014;Eremina...