Hormones
Hormones are small molecules that are released by one part of a plant to influence another part. The principal plant growth hormones are the auxins, gibberellins, cytokinins, abscisic acid, and ethylene. Plants use these hormones to cause cells to elongate, divide, become specialized, and separate from each other, and help coordinate the development of the entire plant. Not only are the plant hormones small in molecular weight, they are also active in the plant in very small amounts, a fact that made their isolation and identification difficult.
The first plant growth hormones discovered were the auxins. (The term auxin is derived from a Greek word meaning "to grow.") The best known and most widely distributed hormone in this class is indole-3-acetic acid. Fritz W. Went, whose pioneering and ingenious research in 1928 opened the field of plant hormones, reported that auxins were involved in the control of the growth movements that orient shoots toward the light, and that they had the additional, striking quality of moving only from the shoot tip toward the shoot base. This polarity of auxin movement was an inherent property of the plant tissue, only slightly influenced by gravity. Other less-investigated auxins include phenyl-acetic acid and indole-butyric acid, the latter long used as a synthetic auxin but found to exist in plants only in 1985.
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