Moss and trees may share ancient plumbing-building genes
Blanco-Touriñán N, Blázquez MÁ
Plant Signaling
The moss carpeting the shady side of your garden path and the oak towering above it both move water through cells built from the same ancient genetic blueprint, just wired up in strikingly different ways.
Every land plant needs a way to move water and nutrients around, whether it's a towering tree or a low carpet of moss. This review pulls together fossil evidence and genetic studies to show that even the earliest land plants, going back over 400 million years, already had many of the genetic tools needed to build these transport systems. Different plant groups then took that same shared toolkit and reshuffled it in their own ways, which is why a moss's water-conducting cells and a tree's xylem look so different but may share a surprisingly deep common origin.
Key Findings
Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) evolved functionally analogous water/nutrient transport cells (hydroids, leptoids, pegged rhizoids) distinct from tracheophyte xylem and phloem
Fossil evidence from the early Devonian plant Horneophyton suggests multifunctional conducting cells predate the split between bryophyte and tracheophyte conducting systems
Conducting tissues evolved through redeployment of shared genetic modules, lineage-specific innovations, and rewiring, including independently evolved mechanisms controlling pegged rhizoids in some liverworts
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists reviewed how plants evolved specialized internal 'plumbing' to move water and nutrients, finding that mosses, liverworts, and complex plants like trees all reused and repurposed the same ancient genetic toolkit in different ways to build their transport tissues.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Evolution of molecular networks underlying plant tissue patterning: insights from conducting tissues.
The emergence of land plants involved the progressive elaboration of molecular networks that pattern tissues and define specialized cell types, as illustrated by the evolution of diverse conducting...
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Horneophyton is an extinct early plant which may form a "missing link" between the hornworts and the Rhyniopsida. It is a member of the class Horneophytopsida. Horneophyton is among the most abundant fossil organisms found in the Rhynie chert, a Devonian Lagerstätte in Aberdeenshire, UK. A single...