Environmental gradients reveal stress hubs pre-dating plant terrestrialization

Plant terrestrialization brought forth the land plants (embryophytes). Embryophytes account for most of the biomass on land and evolved from streptophyte algae in a singular event. Recent advances have unravelled the first full genomes of the closest algal relatives of land plants; among the first s...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dadras, Armin, Fürst-Jansen, Janine M. R., Darienko, Tatyana, Krone, Denis, Scholz, Patricia, Sun, Siqi, Herrfurth, Cornelia, Rieseberg, Tim P., Irisarri, Iker, Steinkamp, Rasmus, Hansen, Maike, Buschmann, Henrik, Valerius, Oliver, Braus, Gerhard H., Hoecker, Ute, Feussner, Ivo, Mutwil, Marek, Ischebeck, Till, de Vries, Sophie, Lorenz, Maike, de Vries, Jan
Other Authors: School of Biological Sciences
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/174186
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Plant terrestrialization brought forth the land plants (embryophytes). Embryophytes account for most of the biomass on land and evolved from streptophyte algae in a singular event. Recent advances have unravelled the first full genomes of the closest algal relatives of land plants; among the first such species was Mesotaenium endlicherianum. Here we used fine-combed RNA sequencing in tandem with a photophysiological assessment on Mesotaenium exposed to a continuous range of temperature and light cues. Our data establish a grid of 42 different conditions, resulting in 128 transcriptomes and ~1.5 Tbp (~9.9 billion reads) of data to study the combinatory effects of stress response using clustering along gradients. Mesotaenium shares with land plants major hubs in genetic networks underpinning stress response and acclimation. Our data suggest that lipid droplet formation and plastid and cell wall-derived signals have denominated molecular programmes since more than 600 million years of streptophyte evolution-before plants made their first steps on land.