ConducTORs of a Signaling Symphony: Metabolic and Hormone Responses Converge on TOR and EIN2 in plants.

Development is coordinated by dozens of signals that act in overlapping pathways to orchestrate multicellular growth. Understanding how signaling pathways intersect and diverge at a molecular level is critical to predicting how organisms will react to dynamic environmental conditions. In plants, two antagonistic signaling hubs are strictly required to sense and respond to many nutrients and hormones: TARGET OF RAPAMYCIN (TOR) and ETHYLENE INSENSITIVE 2 (EIN2). In this Landmark report, Fu et al. discover that TOR and EIN2 directly interact to choreograph growth and define an unexpected molecular mechanism at the intersection of hormonal and metabolic signaling networks 1 .