The gene that builds flowers is older than flowers themselves
McConnell H, Di Stilio VS
Plant Signaling
Every bloom in your garden owes its structure to a genetic switch that's been quietly repurposed for over 400 million years, since before plants even had flowers to make.
There's a gene called LEAFY that tells a flowering plant where to grow its flowers. But this same gene shows up in mosses, ferns, and other plants that never evolved flowers at all, which puzzled scientists for years. This review pulls together new evidence suggesting LEAFY's reproductive job actually started way back in the gametophyte stage of early land plants, long before flowers existed, and was later repurposed as plants evolved to spend more time in their sporophyte (spore-producing) stage.
Key Findings
LEAFY (LFY) homologs exist across all major land plant lineages, not just flowering plants, indicating deep evolutionary origins predating flowers
Evidence from non-flowering plant orthologs supports LFY's reproductive role emerging in the haploid gametophyte generation, then being co-opted into the sporophyte as plants shifted toward diploid-dominant life cycles
New mechanistic studies classify LFY as a 'pioneer transcription factor,' a functional category that helps explain how it can access and reprogram compacted DNA to trigger developmental change
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists tracing the gene LEAFY, which tells flowers where to form, found that its reproductive job likely evolved way earlier than thought, first appearing in the tiny gametophyte generation of ancient land plants before eventually being repurposed to build flowers.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
The evolution and development of LEAFY function.
Even though the canonical role of the transcription factor gene LEAFY (LFY) is in establishing the identity of angiosperm floral meristems, homologs of this gene are found across all land plants, p...
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