Dolf Weijers, an EMBO Fellow and head of the Department of Biochemistry at Wageningen University, visited the 424th session of the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) Lecture Hall. He delivered an engaging lecture titled “Cell Signaling – Timing Determines Everything” for the faculty and students in attendance.

Academician Dolf Weijers is a leading scholar in the international field of plant developmental biology, with research focusing on cutting-edge areas such as the molecular mechanisms of early plant embryogenesis, auxin signal transduction, and cell fate determination.

In the lecture, Academician Dolf Weijers’ report focused on the plant’s response mechanisms to external signals, particularly auxin. He began with the spatiotemporal response mechanisms of plants to environmental changes and elaborated in detail on how, within an extremely short period after auxin stimulation, cells initiate a rapid pre-transcriptional response through a sophisticated protein phosphorylation cascade. This part of the content revealed an immediate regulatory layer beyond the traditional “slow” signaling pathways and emphasized the decisive role of “timing” in decoding signals. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, he pointed out that this core module for environmental response based on rapid phosphorylation is highly conserved throughout the long evolutionary process from algae to higher plants, highlighting its fundamental importance for plant survival. Academician Weijers also shared his team’s innovative technologies. To capture these fleeting early signaling events, they collaborated to develop special microfluidic devices that enable high-throughput stimulation and synchronized observation of living plant cells with millisecond precision. The entire presentation, spanning molecular mechanisms, evolutionary origins, and research methods, provided a new perspective for comprehensively understanding the logic chain of plants’ rapid responses to external signals, and the research paradigm offers an innovative approach that can be referenced for identifying rapid response components in hormone and mechanical signaling.

During the Q&A session, Academician Dolf Weijers and the students further discussed the rapid response mechanisms of plants to the environment and had in-depth exchanges on future research directions for deciphering plant signal transduction mechanisms.