Plants, like animals, employ hormones as messengers, which coordinate growth and regulate how they react to the environment. One of these plant hormones, auxin, regulates nearly all aspects of plant behavior and development, for example phototropism, root growth and fruit growth. Depending on the context, auxin elicits a range of responses such as cell polarization or division. In this week's edition of Science (DOI:10.1126/science.1245125), a team of researchers including Jiri Friml from IST Austria and led by Zhenbiao Yang of the University of California, Riverside, report finding the molecular mechanism by which the plant hormone auxin affects the organization of the cell's inner skeletons.
↧