Environmental strigolactone drives early growth responses to neighboring plants and soil volume in pea.

There has been a dramatic recent increase in the understanding of the mechanisms by which plants detect their neighbors, including by touch, reflected light, volatile organic chemicals, and root exudates. The importance of root exudates remains ill-defined because of confounding experimental variables and difficulties disentangling neighbor detection in shoot and roots. There is evidence that root exudates allow distinction between kin and non-kin neighbors, but identification of specific exudates that function in neighbor detection and/or kin recognition remain elusive.

Integrated dominance mechanisms regulate reproductive architecture in Arabidopsis thaliana and Brassica napus.

The production of seed in flowering plants is complicated by the need to first invest in reproductive shoots, inflorescences, flowers, and fruit. Furthermore, in many species, it will be months between plants generating flowers and setting seed. How can plants therefore produce an optimal seed-set relative to environmental resources when the "reproductive architecture" that supports seed-set needs to be elaborated so far in advance? Here, we address this question by investigating the spatio-temporal control of reproductive architecture in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) and Brassica napus.

Wheat plants sense substrate volume and root density to proactively modulate shoot growth.

Plants must carefully coordinate their growth and development with respect to prevailing environmental conditions. To do this, plants can use a range of nutritional and non-nutritional information that allows them to proactively modulate their growth to avoid resource limitations. As is well-known to gardeners and horticulturists alike, substrate volume strongly influences plant growth, and maybe a key source of non-nutritional information for plants.

There and back again: An evolutionary perspective on long-distance coordination of plant growth and development.

Vascular plants, unlike bryophytes, have a strong root-shoot dichotomy in which the tissue systems are mutually interdependent; roots are completely dependent on shoots for photosynthetic sugars, and shoots are completely dependent on roots for water and mineral nutrients. Long-distance communication between shoot and root is therefore critical for the growth, development and survival of vascular plants, especially with regard to variable environmental conditions. However, this long-distance signalling does not appear an ancestral feature of land plants, and has likely arisen in vascular plants to service the radical alterations in body-plan seen in this taxon.