Brassinosteroids (BRs) are key regulators in plant growth and development. The main BR-perceiving receptor in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) is BRASSINOSTEROID INSENSITIVE1 (BRI1). Seedling root growth and hypocotyl elongation can be accurately predicted using a model for BRI1 receptor activity. Genetic evidence shows that non-ligand-binding coreceptors of the SOMATIC EMBRYOGENESIS RECEPTOR...

To withstand ever-changing environmental stresses, plants are equipped with phytohormone-mediated stress resistance mechanisms. Salt stress triggers abscisic acid (ABA) signaling, which enhances stress tolerance at the expense of growth. ABA is thought to inhibit the action of growth-promoting hormones, including brassinosteroids (BRs). However, the regulatory mechanisms that coordinate ABA and...

We have isolated a new recessive dwarf mutant of rice (Oryza sativa L. cv Nipponbare). Under normal growth conditions, the mutant has very short leaf sheaths; has short, curled, and frizzled leaf blades; has few tillers; and is sterile. Longitudinal sections of the leaf sheaths revealed that the cell length along the longitudinal axis is reduced, which explains the short leaf sheaths. Transvers...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY To reach favorable conditions for photosynthesis, seedlings grow upward when deprived of light upon underground germination. To direct their growth, they use their negative gravitropic capacity. Negative gravitropism is under tight control of multiple hormones. METHODS By counting the number of standing plants in a population or by real time monitoring of the reorientatio...

Maintaining active growth and effective immune responses is often costly for a living organism to survive. Fine-tuning the shared cross-regulators is crucial for metazoans and plants to make a trade-off between growth and immunity. The Arabidopsis regulatory receptor-like kinase BAK1 complexes with the receptor kinases FLS2 in bacterial flagellin-triggered immunity and BRI1 in brassinosteroid (...

Brassinosteroid (BR) regulates plant development by activating the transcription factor brassinazole resistant 1 (BZR1), which activates and represses different target genes to switch cellular programmes. The mechanisms that determine BZR1's transcriptional activities remain largely unknown. Here we show that BZR1 represses target genes by recruiting the Groucho/TUP1-like transcriptional corepr...

Maintenance and release of seed dormancy is regulated by plant hormones; their levels and seed sensitivity being the critical factors. This study reports transcriptional regulation of brassinosteroids (BR), ethylene (ET), cytokinin (CK) and salicylic acid (SA) related wheat genes by after-ripening, a period of dry storage that decays dormancy. Changes in the expression of hormonal genes due to ...

GSK3 is a highly conserved kinase that negatively regulates many cellular processes by phosphorylating a variety of protein substrates. BIN2 is a GSK3-like kinase in Arabidopsis that functions as a negative regulator of brassinosteroid (BR) signaling. It was proposed that BR signals, perceived by a membrane BR receptor complex that contains the leucine (Leu)-rich repeat receptor-like kinase BRI...

Endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-associated degradation (ERAD) is an integral part of the ER quality-control system that removes toxic misfolded proteins via ubiquitin/proteasome-mediated degradation. Most of our knowledge on ERAD comes from biochemical and genetic studies in yeast and mammalian cells. Although ERAD is known to operate in plant cells, little is known about its molecular components an...

Plants use cell-surface-resident receptor-like kinases (RLKs) to sense diverse extrinsic and intrinsic cues and elicit distinct biological responses. In Arabidopsis, ERECTA family RLKs recognize EPIDERMAL PATTERNING FACTORS (EPFs) to specify stomatal patterning. However, little is known about the molecular link between ERECTA activation and intracellular signaling. We report here that the SOMAT...