Abstract
Long-standing major questions in auxin biology are now being answered through the latest discoveries and characterizations of auxin receptors and transporters. An F-box protein TIR1 and its close homologs are emerging as potent auxin receptors, which directly modulate the degradation of transcriptional repressors for auxin-responsive genes. The membrane proteins for polar auxin transport, intuited by Darwin almost 130 years ago, have been characterized over the past decade and implicated in diverse aspects of auxin-mediated plant development. This growth regulator is now considered to be a plant equivalent of morphogen because of how crucial the formation of its transporter-associated concentration gradient is to the patterning processes of plants. Such long-distance auxin-signaling from the source to the target cell via transporters has helped advance our understanding of plant development as a holistic system. Here, we summarize recent achievements in the study of molecular and long-distance signaling mechanisms for auxin, and discuss their biological meaning.
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Cho, M., Lee, O.R., Ganguly, A. et al. Auxin-signaling: short and long. J. Plant Biol. 50, 79–89 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03030615
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03030615