Congratulations and chapeau! This is so good to see.

Congratulations, Ulli!

Chapeau! This is simply beautiful.

Really, you better make sure that this ends smoothly!

Thanks! A good day for plant sciences.

Congratulations!

Thus, collectively, we think that the SL signaling pathway is one tool by which plants can modulate their water transport capacity to withstand water deficiency conditions.

Lastly, we saw that drought-induced reduction of vessel element size is hardly happening in SL signaling-deficient mutants and that, thus, drought-induced adjustments of vessel elements is SL-dependent.

As a new direction (at least for us) we then tested the effect of altered vessel formation on water loss and found that more vessels are correlated with enhanced transpiration and that this was not caused by other effects like altered stomata density.

The effect of SL signaling on auxin-related genes seems to be the crucial point here as those genes are clearly over-represented among the SL target genes and elimination of some of the auxin-dependent xylem regulators eliminated enhanced vessel formation in SL signaling deficient mutants.