Tag: Evolution

Many bryophytes and other non-seed plants are tolerant to vegetative desiccation, which is thought to have been necessary for colonization of land. By contrast, most seed plants lack this capacity, although they retain desiccation tolerance in their pollen and seeds. However, some seed plants, known…

Studies on Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM) plant genomes are scarse and CAM evolution is known to be an ecological driver of diversification. The subgenus Tillandsia (Bromeliaceae) is one of the fastest diversifying clades in the plant kingdom and is known for its adaptive CAM trait. It has recently…

Low-resolution data can provide broad strokes but miss the details that come from greater information density. When striving to understand the multimillion-year evolutionary history of the angiosperms, more data certainly helps. Here, by focusing on a subset of 353 genes, Zuntini and Carruthers et al.…

As one of the most traded commodities in the world, coffee has cultural and economic impact that spans continents. The main source of coffee beans, Coffea arabica (Arabica), is a polyploid species that resulted from the hybridization between diploid C. canephora (Robusta) and C. eugenioides (Eugenioides).…

Polyploidy, arising from whole-genome duplication, is a common phenomenon in plant species. However, newly formed polyploids are often infertile and the mechanism(s) by which they adapt to their new karyotypes remain unclear. In this article, Westermann and colleagues chemically induced the formation…

Plants use a suite of cell-surface receptors as signal transducers in both development and immunity. In this study, Ngou et al. utilized computational and functional approaches to examine the evolutionary origin of a subclass of plant cell-surface receptors called pattern recognition receptors (PRRs),…

It’s easy for most of us to grasp how an enzyme evolves new functions or substrate specificities, but envisioning how something incredibly complex like the human eye can be quite challenging (even Darwin was stumped). In this fascinating paper, Chomicki et al. asked how two geographically…

In angiosperms, pollen germination leads to a period of extensive polarized growth of the pollen tube, which carries the sperm nuclei to the ovule. Studies of tip growth in both pollen tubes and root hairs have contributed to a descriptive model that involves polarized vesicle movement along the cytoskeleton…