What does hormone Ecdysone do in plants?

[dkim at unm.edu]

Hello:

I have a PCR-amplified cDNA clone from Jimsonweed (Datura innoxia) cell 
cultures.  When I ran a sequence search using blastx (translated sequence
vs protein databases), one of the really good matches was an Ecdysone-
responsive protein in Drosphila.  I looked in a plant biochemistry text
and found that Ecdysone-like hormones are also made by plants, but no 
clue was given as to their function.

Does anyone know?  I am especially interested in stress responses, since my
cell cultures were exposed to the chemical TNT (as in !BOOM!) before
RNA extraction.

Daniel Kim