evolution
Evolution is the process by which heritable traits in plant populations change over successive generations through mechanisms such as natural selection, genetic drift, and mutation. Understanding plant evolution reveals how species have adapted to diverse environments, developed defenses against pathogens and herbivores, and diversified into the enormous variety of forms seen today. This knowledge underpins modern plant breeding, conservation efforts, and our ability to predict how plant populations may respond to environmental change.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-05-12
Scientists discovered that land plants evolved a sophisticated ability to combine light and temperature signals synergistically — not just additively — to control growth, tracing this capacity to the streptophyte lineage and identifying a conserved set of molecular regulators shared across all land plants.
Streptophyte algae (the lineage that gave rise to land plants) show synergistic developmental and transcriptional responses to combined light and temperature, while chlorophyte algae show only additive responses — pinpointing where this capacity evolved.
Three conserved regulators — phytochrome photoreceptors, PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTOR (PIF), and ELONGATED HYPOCOTYL 5 (HY5) — underpin light-temperature integration across all land plants studied, from bryophytes to flowering plants.
Lineage-specific diversification of downstream gene expression responses is driven by redistribution of where these conserved regulators bind in the genome, not by swapping out the regulators themselves.