Strigolactones: howfar is their commercial use for agricultural purposes?

Strigolactones are a class of natural and synthetic compounds that in the past decade have been exciting the scientific community not only for their intriguing biological properties but also for their potential applications in agriculture. These applications range fromtheir use as hormones tomodify and/ormanage plant architecture, to their use as stimulants to induce seed germination of parasitic weeds and thus control their infestation by a reduced seed bank, to their use as ‘biostimulants’ of plant root colonisation by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, improving plant nutritional capabilities, to other still unknown effects onmicrobial soil communities.More recently, these compounds have also been attracting the interest of agrochemical companies. In spite of their biological attractiveness, practical applications are still greatly hampered by the lowproduct yields obtainable by plant root exudates, by the costs of their synthesis, by the lack of knowledge of their off-target effects and by the notyet specifiedorproperlyidentifiedlegislationthat couldregulatetheuseof thesecompounds,dependingontheagricultural purposes. The aimof this article is todiscuss, in the light of current knowledge, thedifferent scenarios thatmightplay out in the near futurewith regard to the practical application of strigolactones.