Official Project Description
Hormone signaling in parasitic weeds Parasitic weeds such as Striga destroy ~$10 billion worth of food crops worldwide every year.
Their seeds can lie dormant in the soil for years and germinate when it detects a chemical signal from host plants called strigolactone.
Additionally, the receptor proteins that perceive strigolactone are several orders of magnitude more sensitive than the ones found in host plants, meaning they can induce signaling at much lower levels of strigolactone.
This series of project aims to provide molecular insight into the strigolactone signaling process to facilitate the design of agrochemicals that can be used to combat parasitic weeds.