The remarkable progress in genetics and molecular biology has profoundly transformed our ability to manipulate the functions of genes and proteins in plants with unprecedented spatial and temporal specificity, providing the means to extract the roles they play in distinct cells and cellular compartments. In stark contrast, due to lack of comparable methodologies, our ability to manipulate small-molecules, endogenous or synthetic, has remained largely unchanged over decades; they can only be applied indiscriminately to the whole plant, or at the organ level at most, and always from the outside. By globally applying small-molecules to the plant we completely loose the spatial and temporal context in which they often act.

We are developing and implementing a set of exclusive chemical-biology approaches to control and manipulate the bioactivity of endogenous and synthetic small-molecules with cellular and sub-cellular specificity in whole, live plants. These include, for example, photocaging, targeting and enzyme-mediated activation.

I expect that successful realization of these approaches will improve the way small-molecules can be studied and applied in plant sciences and will open new avenues for their smarter use in agriculture.