Recent Advances in Brassinosteroid Research: From Molecular Mechanisms to Practical Applications.

Abstract

Brassinosteroids (BRs) are now firmly established as essential regulators of plant growth and development affecting a broad spectrum of processes at the molecular, cellular and physiological levels. The pace of BR research has continued to accelerate since the discovery of BR-insensitive and -deficient mutants in the mid 1990’s and progress in understanding mechanistic details of both BR signal transduction and biosynthesis has been particularly dramatic. Studies on the effect of BRs on whole plant physiology, including stress adaptation, continue to build on early experiments in numerous crop species while integrating the advances made in BR molecular genetics in Arabidopsis. The ability to manipulate endogenous BR levels in mutant plants affected in BR biosynthetic genes and/or in transgenic plants with altered expression levels of these genes, has allowed testing for causal relationships in BR action that were previously only inferred by application of exogenous BR to wild-type plants. The discovery of specific inhibitors of BR biosynthesis that phenocopy BR-deficient mutants has greatly facilitated these types of studies and has