Welcome to the Moss Lab at Whitman College! Take a moment to imagine your favorite plant. What are its unique characteristics? Is it short and bushy, or tall and slender? Does it bend in response to light or gravity? Does it have deep, dense roots? We work on trying to determine how these features are “programmed” into plants, what molecules carry out these programs, and how the programs might be tweaked to provide plants with new and useful traits. In particular, we focus on a small plant hormone called auxin that seems to play an important role at almost all phases of plant growth and development.