Unravelling Spatio-temporal Auxin Intracellular Redistribution for Morphogenesis (STARMORPH)

STARMORPH is a ground-breaking endeavour with the ambitious goal of understanding plant organ morphogenesis, which will pave the way to engineering plant growth.

This is of paramount importance for enhancing agricultural and forestry yields and hence contributing to global food security and environmental sustainability.

Plant organ morphogenesis involves differential growth, where various organ parts expand at different rates to create specific structures.

A significant challenge lies in understanding these differential growth programs while considering the mechanical constraints imposed by the tissues. The plant hormone auxin plays a central role in differential growth. It forms concentration gradients within tissues, dictating the direction and rate of cell expansion.

Mechanistically, auxin can either repress or promote growth in a tissue and concentration-dependent manner, but this biphasic behaviour remains largely unexplained.

The extracellular space, cytosol, and nucleus have distinct auxin perception mechanisms and hence STARMORPH pitches an ""auxin signature"" concept, considering nuanced auxin levels in each compartment specifying an ensemble signal with quantitative and qualitative cell responses for morphogenesis.

Currently, auxin subcellular compartmentalisation is poorly understood, and a key focus of the project is to provide a subcellular map of auxin dynamics within a growing organ to uncover how tissue mechanics interact with auxin-dependent growth processes, which will be pivotal for understanding plant morphogenesis.

The STARMORPH project leverages a unique combination of plant, cell and synthetic biology, genetics, biophysics and organic chemistry expertise.

This interdisciplinary collaboration aims to dissect plant morphogenesis from molecular to organ scales and has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of plant growth and development, with applications in biotechnology and plant engineering.