Hormones play a crucial role both in plants and animals. As we all known, hormones work through specific receptors in different organisms. Therefore, the hormone interaction between plant and animal is an interesting question worth discussing. Recently, food safety has become a common topic concerned by consumers. A widely discussed rumor such as “Fruit bulking agent is some human reproductive hormones” leads us to consider whether animal hormones did regulate plant growth. Based on the large amount of previous research, we demonstrated that animal hormones did affect plant, such as steroid hormones for livestock feed could regulate physiological processes in plant including flowering, senescence and stress resistance after excreted into the environment. Here, we summarize the previous studies and systematically discuss the effects of animal hormones on plant growth and development.

Lodging is a threat for maize production worldwide. Coronatine (COR) is a jasmonic acid analog hopeful to be a new plant growth regulator in agriculture. In this study, we demonstrated that the plant height of ZD958 and XY335, two cultivated maize hybrids, was significantly decreased under COR treatment via reducing internode length and thus improve lodging resistance. To explore gene expression changes driving the responses of internode to COR, spatio-temporal transcriptomic data of inbred B73 internode were generated under normal condition and COR treatment, including the fixed, meristem and elongation regions. The transcriptional features of the three regions at normal condition were characterized and then compared with that upon COR treatment. A total of 8605 COR-responsive genes (COR-RGs) were identified, including 802 internode specific genes. Both the number and function categories were greatly changed for COR-RGs identified in fixed, meristem and elongation regions, indicating different groups of genes were regulated at the three regions. Besides, we found the expressions of more than 80% of gibberellin and jasmonic acid related genes were changed under COR treatment. The characterization of gene expression response in internode under COR treatment here is useful for further unraveling the mechanism of plant height decrease by COR.