Seventh Week of Lecture of BSM3101 with Dr. Parames

This week, is our last week with Dr. Parames for this semester. We discussed about plant hormones on Tuesday (31st October). We actually have learned about it in our secondary school and foundation year, but in this course, we studied even deeper for the plant hormones topic.

Firstly, we are introduced with the "Signal Transduction Pathway in Plants" as it is the fundamental of plant hormones mechanism. It consists of three pathway, that are "Reception", "Signal transduction" and "Response". The hormones will bind to a receptor (e.g. phytochrome receptor protein, phototropin receptor protein) and becomes activated. Transduction pathway is a series of relay proteins/enzymes that pass a signal until it reaches the machinery of the cell. Response is the result of the transduction pathway. It is most often a change in gene expression or a cellular process affects plant growth and development.

There are 5 types of plants hormones:-

• Auxin
• Gibberellic acid
• Cytokinin
• Abscisic acid
• Ethylene

I was enlightened to study about all of this signals in plants. Auxin is not just inducing growth of the plants by promoting cell elongation, but it also help in delaying fruit ripening. It was something new for me because I had never know about it.

On Thursday (2nd November), Dr. Parames discussed about our Test 1 questions. She was a bit disappointed because there are some students that failed in their test even though the questions given to us are not that tough.

 Thank you Dr. Parames for teaching us for 7 weeks in this semester ! See you next year !