One plant hormone shapes crop yield, quality, and nutrition together
Khisti M, Sreenivasulu N
Plant Signaling
The size and shape of the tomatoes, rice, and grains on your plate are steered by a single hormone pathway that breeders are learning to fine-tune rather than just crank up or down.
Plants make a hormone called brassinosteroid that helps decide how big a grain of rice gets, how a tomato is shaped, and even how nutritious the harvest turns out to be. For years, breeders boosting yield sometimes accidentally hurt taste or nutrition, but this review shows scientists are now learning to tune the hormone's signals precisely enough to get bigger, tastier, and healthier crops all at once.
Key Findings
Brassinosteroid signalling shapes panicle architecture and grain or fruit size and shape across both cereals and horticultural crops
The pathway interacts with other plant hormone networks, meaning targeted tweaks can shift multiple traits simultaneously rather than one at a time
Natural genetic variation in brassinosteroid components offers breeders existing raw material to fine-tune yield, quality, and nutrition without engineering from scratch
chevron_right Technical Summary
This review explains how a plant hormone called brassinosteroid controls not just how much food crops produce, but also their size, shape, and nutritional content, offering breeders a way to improve all three at once instead of trading one for another.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Balancing yield, quality, and nutrition through fine-tuned brassinosteroid signalling.
Increasing evidence indicates that brassinosteroids (BRs) signalling influences not only yield but also crop quality and nutritional attributes that underpin consumer preference and food security. ...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
Was this useful?
Want to tell us more? (optional)
Thanks for the note!
Something went wrong — please try again.
Too many submissions. Try again in an hour.
Gene editing removes 97% of celiac-triggering proteins from bread wheat
It could mean that people with celiac disease — roughly 1 in 100 worldwide — may one day safely eat bread made from real wheat, without sacrificing the taste...
Rice is a cereal grain and in its domesticated form is the staple food of over half of the world's population, particularly in Asia and Africa. Rice is the seed of the grass species Oryza sativa —or, much less commonly, Oryza glaberrima. Asian rice was domesticated in China some 13,500 to 8,200 y...