Connected phytohormone biosynthesis pathways at the core of growth-stress tradeoffs

How plants experiencing environmental stress regulate their growth to survive is a fundamental question crucial for future food security.Drought and high salinity both represent osmotic stresses that severely decrease crop yields worldwide.Under-standing how plants cope with these stresses becomes increas-ingly critical as the world faces a rapid deterioration of arable land.Plants respond to stress by activating stress-avoidance or stress-tolerance pathways,reprogramming gene regulatory net-works,and increasing protective solutes(reviewed in Claeys and Inze,2013;Zhang et al.,2020).A primary outcome of increasing stress tolerance is reduced growth,creating an essential tradeoff between growth and stress tolerance-plants must carefully manage this tradeoff to survive the stress and maintain competitiveness.Recently,a study by Liu et al.(2022)demonstrated a new mechanism in which these tradeoffs are achieved.