Plants grow bigger to handle heat, VIB-UGent team reveals role of phytohormone

A specific plant hormone, jasmine acid, plays a vital role in many stress responses, including the wound response, cold stress, and heat. Could it also play a role in heat-induced plant growth?

Professor Yves de Smet of the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology and his team set out to answer this question.

“Our starting point was previously published data on regulated proteins in wheat seedlings exposed to high temperatures. To investigate whether jasmonite signals play a role in growth in response to warmer temperatures, we used both Arabidopsis Like wheat as model plants,” said doctoral student Tingting Zhou, lead author of the study.

Jasmonates are a group of plant hormones that play a regulatory role in the immune system and many other processes in plants, including growth, aging, and fertility. Jasmine acid is its main representative.

Arabidopsis thaliana Or garden cress is a small flowering plant related to cabbage. It is one of the model organisms for studying genetics and biology at the molecular level of plants and therefore it is widely used in research.