Waters MT, Nelson DC. (2023) “Karrikin perception and signalling.” New Phytologist. 237 (5), 1525-1541
In this Tansley review, Mark Waters and I try our best to give a thorough summary of the current knowledge of how plants sense karrikins. This field has moved forward rapidly since the first publication of a karrikin isolated from smoke in 2004. We now have a reasonable understanding of the core karrikin signaling mechanism, and the breadth of its roles in plants have certainly surpassed our initial expectations. For newcomers to the field, this article will be a good entry point. For those who are more established, I hope our arguments for karrikin metabolism and the idea that KAI2 is not really a karrikin receptor stimulate useful discussion. An important limitation of this review – due to a lack of space – is that we were not able to go in depth into the many developmental traits that are controlled by KAR/KL signaling, or hash out the crosstalk/signal integration between KAR/KL and light, temperature, and plant hormones that has been revealed in the recent literature.