Tag: Plant evolution

Plants. When we read this word, what comes to mind might be a rose, a tomato plant, or an oak tree. But plants belong to a green lineage that is far more diverse than what we encounter in daily life. This lineage also includes unicellular green algae. The evolution of the green lineage spans over a billion…

Current Biology has an excellent special issue on plant evolution full of  fascinating articles. As an example, a Primer by Zhuo Feng looks at how plants were catastrophically impacted by the end-Permian mass extinction event approximately 250 million years ago. The fossil record from the Cathaysian…

When plants first moved onto land, they encountered challenges that aquatic ancestors never faced, including heat, dehydration, and rapidly changing environmental conditions. This review by Wang et al., explores how cytokinin signaling, a pathway best known for regulating plant growth and development,…

We are living at a time where insights into plant diversity, function, and evolution are being revealed at an unprecedented rate, thanks largely to the ability to readily sequence and assemble genomes. A new Perspective by Want, along with a large, international group of co-authors, sets out an exciting…

I love learning about the many molecular adaptations that allowed plants to adapt to life on land, and particularly have enjoyed sharing the iconic micrograph from Remy et al (1994) that shows a 400 year old arbuscular mycorrhiza of the fungus Glomeromycotina  inside a cell of Aglaophyton major. Now,…

The transition of plants from aquatic to terrestrial environments occurred approximately 400 million years ago, leading to the diversification of two major lineages: tracheophytes (vascular plants) and bryophytes (non-vascular plants). While most studies on plant adaptation to environmental stressors…

I suspect if we asked someone to describe a fossil we’d hear a lot about dinosaur bones. Certainly, science museums are full of fossilized animal remains, which have greatly informed our understanding of animal evolution. Plant fossils similarly are rich sources of information about plant evolution…