Tag: Evolution

Plants produce a wide range of polysaccharides in their cell walls, some of which are restricted to certain species. Roberts et al. investigated a moss gene encoding an enzyme that resembles a mixed-linkage (1,3;1,4)-β-glucan (MLG) synthase. When expressed in tobacco, this enzyme produces a novel unbranched,…

Plants rely on two branches of the innate immunity system to prevent or eliminate microbial infections: one involves cell surface receptors to respond to pathogen- or microbe- associated molecular patterns, and the other acts inside plant cells by using proteins with nucleotide-binding site (NBS) and…

Land plants evolved from freshwater charophyte algae over 450 million years ago and have since diverged into the multitude of plant lineages observed today. The extent to which prominent plant hormones and cognate receptor proteins, which play essential roles in evolutionarily young angiosperms, are…

Many fungi are pathogens that kill or weaken their plant hosts. However, there are also many species that form beneficial relationships with plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. One of these mutualisms is the mycorrhizal association between a fungus and a plant root, where the fungus provides the plant…

Are you curious about why and how angiosperms, flowering plants, are the youngest lineage of land plants and have become the most abundant group of plants? You are not alone. Generations of botanists and evolutionary biologists have wondered about this same thing. Many questions have been answered, such…

Auxin is an endogenous plant hormone that orchestrates complex tissue development across diverse green plant lineages. In a recent article, Mutte et al. performed a deep phylogenomics analysis of known and predicted auxin signalling mechanisms present in green plants and their algal predecessors. This…

Nobody doubts the great insights we have gained about plant diversity and evolution from genome sequencing, but the patchy nature of available genomes within the plant phylogeny remains a problem. Cheng et al. describe the 10KP (10,000 Plants) Genome Sequencing Project, which aims to sequence genomes…

Deleterious mutations often underlie disease susceptibility and reduced fitness, but are very difficult to study due to their low frequency in the population. Maize is a great system for studying deleterious mutations because of high genetic diversity and the rapid decay in genetic linkage, enabling…