Dr Phil Brewer has joined the University of Adelaide Waite Campus as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Phil’s research interest involves how plant hormones help plants to respond to changed growth conditions. His recent research has focused on strigolactone production and action, particularly how that relates to auxin and the transport of auxin. Strigolactones are regulators of shoot branching, root architecture and plant–fungi symbiosis. They help plants cope with sub-optimal growth conditions, such as low nutrients, shading, cold, drought and salinity, and attack from pathogens or parasitic weeds. Strigolactones seem to function directly in responsive plant tissues through regulating gene expression. However, they also display a distinctive non-transcriptional inhibition of auxin transporters. A key research aim for Dr Brewer is to uncover the mechanism of strigolactone action on auxin transport, and how this may affect root and shoot architecture in Arabidopsis and barley.