Newly discovered regulatory peptides underpin root organogenesis, environmental sensing, symbiosis and nematode parasitism

The root system plays fundamental roles in nutrient and water acquisition, plant productivity and fitness and there is an urgent requirement to understand and optimise how roots sequester nutrients to provide food, fibre, feed and fuel. We have discovered new activities for plant regulatory peptides that link agronomically important environmental sensing pathways to the regulation of root development but also enable debilitating-plant root knot nematodes to establish galls. We seek to understand how these peptide regulators work, define the pathways they co-ordinate and establish a clear understanding of how environmental cues and root developmental pathways interact to determine root architecture.