Harro Bouwmeester is Chair of Plant Hormone Biology at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS) of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His primary research interest is the communication of plants, through signalling molecules, with other plants and organisms in their environment, particularly in the rhizosphere. For example, the exudation by plants of strigolactones to signal host presence to symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and the abuse of this signalling relation by parasitic plants that use the same molecules for host detection. He and others have shown that the strigolactones also have an endogenous signalling function as new class of plant hormones, regulating root and shoot architecture, making this interaction even more intriguing. The amazing versatility of the strigolactones has prompted him to formulate a paradigm – enemies of plants use signal molecules that are essential for the plant for host detection - that he is investigating to discover new plant hormones and/or essential signalling molecules, for example to find signalling molecules that plants use to recruit beneficial micro-organisms.

Important aspects of his work are how these signalling molecules are biosynthesised and perceived, how their production is regulated, and how essential these molecules are for the interaction. To be able to do such studies he has built up a group with broad expertise, ranging from analytical chemistry for detection of the signalling molecules, through molecular biology and biochemistry for the isolation of key-genes using state-of-the-art approaches such as the combination of transcriptomics and metabolomics, to metabolic engineering to change signalling molecule production and basic biology to study the consequences of the altered signalling molecule production for the interaction.