Thinking like a plant

How do plants make decisions about how to grow when they don’t have a brain? British plant developmental biologist Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser DBE FRS travelled to Aotearoa in May to give the 2019 Rutherford Memorial Lecture to share her discoveries of how plants use hormones to control branching and growth. She is particularly interested in the roles and mechanisms of action of plant hormones such as auxin. One of her discoveries – the auxin receptor – has helped to explain how hormone signals shape the response of a plant to its taiao environment. Dame Ottoline is the director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and was awarded a CBE in 2009 in recognition of her pioneering work in plant science.

“Plants have got to make decisions about how to grow and when to grow and when to flower and so on with no central processing and so instead they use this very elegant distributed processing system. It’s substantially based on small molecules, plant hormones, that move about from the shoot to the root and the root to the shoot. Their interactions and their sensitivity to the environment, in combination, allow plants to make decisions about how many branches to make, which places to put these branches and whether to invest in shoots or roots. These are the decisions they are making all the time through this very elegant interaction.”

DAME OTTOLINE LEYSER

LISTEN TO RNZ INTERVIEW: HOW TO THINK LIKE A PLANT