Decoding the Auxin Matrix: Auxin Biology Through the Eye of the Computer

The plant hormone auxin is certainly the most studied developmental regulator in plants. The many functions of auxin during development, from the embryo to the root and shoot construction, are mediated by an ever-growing collection of molecular regulators, with an overwhelming degree of both ubiquity and complexity that we are still far from fully understanding and that biological experiments alone cannot grasp. In this review, we discuss how bioinformatics and computational modeling approaches have helped in recent years to explore this complexity and to push the frontiers of our understanding of auxin biology. We focus on how analysis of massive amounts of genomic data and construction of computational models to simulate auxin-regulated processes at different scales have complemented wet experiments to increase the understanding of how auxin acts in the nucleus to regulate transcription and how auxin movement between cells regulates development at the tissular scale.