Hormones and the Green Revolution

The success of the green revolution largely resulted from the creation of dwarf cultivars of wheat and rice, which had much higher yields than conventional crops. Characterization of these dwarf cultivars showed that the mutant genes were involved in either the synthesis or signaling of gibberellin, a plant growth hormone. In his Perspective, Salamini highlights new work (Multani et al.) that identifies the cause of dwarfism in agronomically important varieties of maize and sorghum. In these cases, dwarfism is caused by defective transport of another growth hormone called auxin.