Plant hormones are versatile chemical regulators of plant growth

The plant hormones are a structurally unrelated collection of small molecules derived from various essential metabolic pathways. These compounds are important regulators of plant growth and mediate responses to both biotic and abiotic stresses. During the last ten years there have been many exciting advances in our understanding of plant hormone biology, including new discoveries in the areas of hormone biosynthesis, transport, perception and response. Receptors for many of the major hormones have now been identified, providing new opportunities to study the chemical specificity of hormone signaling. These studies also reveal a surprisingly important role for the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway in hormone signaling. In addition, recent work confirms that hormone signaling interacts at multiple levels during plant growth and development. In the future, a major challenge will be to understand how the information conveyed by these simple compounds is integrated during plant growth.