Research of the molecular events underlying brassinosteroid (BR) signaling is emerging as a new paradigm for studying plant hormone signal transduction pathways. Two recent reports have shown that the BZR1-BES1 family of proteins is a class of novel plant-specific transcription factors that directly bind to and regulate BR-responsive genes, thus filling in key details of the link between hormonal signal transmission in the cytoplasm and transcriptional status change in the nucleus.