Published in PNAS, the study shows that plants use the hormone abscisic acid (ABA) as a fast‑track messaging system. When temperatures drop, maternal tissues increase ABA production and deliver it to the developing seed. This early hormonal pulse triggers deeper dormancy, effectively “pre‑adapting” the seed for harsher conditions. In warmer conditions, where germination is more favourable, ABA builds more slowly, meaning dormancy is less pronounced.
Crucially, this maternal signalling wasn’t observed in non‑maternal tissues, and plants unable to produce ABA could not trigger dormancy at all — confirming this as an intergenerational communication mechanism rather than a local response. Researchers describe it as a biological parallel to maternal influence in humans: the mother plant adjusts its offspring’s developmental programming based on the environment it experiences.
Why this matters for agriculture
The discovery opens major translational opportunities for crop science:
• Faster adaptation to climate change:
Seeds are not wholly reliant on slow genetic change – they can be immediately primed by the maternal environment. This gives breeders and agronomists a new lever for developing climate‑resilient crops that respond predictably to increasingly volatile seasons.
• Improved seed quality and germinability:
Germinability – a seed’s ability to sprout reliably and on time – remains a challenge for growers. Understanding ABA‑based maternal signalling could help industry develop seeds pre‑adapted to local temperature and nutrient conditions, reducing variability and improving yield predictability.
• New tools for stress‑response breeding:
By adding hormonal “inheritance” to genetic and epigenetic approaches, plant breeders gain an additional mechanism for shaping traits across generations. This could accelerate the development of varieties with finely tuned dormancy, emergence, and stress‑tolerance profiles.
A sign of fields converging: plant health meets human health
This research stands out not only for its agricultural implications, but for what it signals about the growing convergence between plant science and human health research.
Human health scientists worked with plant scientists to discover for the first time how a plant passes down information to the seeds it is developing.
Human health scientists contributed expertise in cell‑level signalling, developmental programming, and epigenetic-like inheritance – areas long studied in medicine but now increasingly relevant in crop biology. Advances in single‑cell and spatial technologies, widely used in biomedical research, enabled the team to map the hormonal movement from maternal tissues into individual seed cells with unprecedented precision.
That cross‑disciplinary partnership reflects a broader trend: understanding food security, climate adaptation, and soil‑plant interactions increasingly depends on the same molecular, genomic and cellular approaches used in human biology. As both sectors grapple with how organisms respond to stress, environment and inherited cues, the boundaries between the fields are breaking down.
A platform for next‑generation crop innovation
By uncovering a previously hidden intergenerational communication channel, the John Innes Centre and Earlham Institute teams have provided breeders and seed companies with a new scientific tool and highlighted the value of collaboration across scientific domains.
As climate pressures intensify, the ability to influence how seeds are “pre‑programmed” could become a key component of resilient, predictable, and high‑performing cropping systems worldwide.
Read the paper:
X. Chen, W. Bezodis, P. González-Suárez, V. Knitlhoffer, A. Goldson, A. Lister, I. Macaulay, & S. Penfield, Adaptation of seed dormancy to maternal climate occurs via intergenerational transport of abscisic acid, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (37) e2519319122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2519319122 (2025).
