Dissecting plant hormone signaling with synthetic molecules: perspective from the chemists

Synthetic molecules can be powerful tools to overcome the limitations of the biological approaches. Especially redundancy, lethality, and intractability of the target genes, which often hamper the progress of plant science, could be bypassed by elaborately designed small molecules. In this review, we discuss how synthetic chemistry can contribute to increasing our understanding of plant hormone signaling. Specific focus will be on the visualization and hijacking of hormone signaling with novel synthetic chemicals, with emphasis on perception of ABA, strigolactones, and auxins.