Towards engineering of hormonal crosstalk in plant immunity

- Hormonal crosstalk is commonly observed during plant immunity.
- Through crosstalk plants can balance immunity, stress tolerance and growth.
- Synthetic biology approaches may be used to engineer hormone crosstalk.
- Such approaches may lead to increased plant immunity and overall fitness.

Plant hormones regulate physiological responses in plants, including responses to pathogens and beneficial microbes. The last decades have provided a vast amount of evidence about the contribution of different plant hormones to plant immunity, and also of how they cooperate to orchestrate immunity activation, in a process known as hormone crosstalk. In this review we highlight the complexity of hormonal crosstalk in immunity and approaches currently being used to further understand this process, as well as perspectives to engineer hormone crosstalk for enhanced pathogen resistance and overall plant fitness.