Nailing down a crucial plant signaling system
Sunday, January 23, 2011 - 13:20
in Biology & Nature
Plant biologists have discovered the last major element of the series of chemical signals that one class of plant hormones, called brassinosteroids, send from a protein on the surface of a plant cell to the cell's nucleus. Although many steps of the pathway were already known, new research from a team including Carnegie's Ying Sun and Zhiyong Wang fills in a missing gap about the mechanism through which brassinosteroids cause plant genes to be expressed. Their research, which will be published online by Nature Cell Biology on January 23, has implications for agricultural science and, potentially, evolutionary research.