Tagged: land plants

July 9, 2019

From Emerald Planet to Eden with Prof. Beerling

Books

Making Eden by David Beerling, 2019. Oxford University Press. Almost 12 years ago I reviewed David Beerling’s previous book The Emerald Planet. I was very impressed with that slim, but information-packed, volume; I’m even more impressed with his latest tome, Making Eden. Yes, Making Eden has a rather straightforward message: How plants transformed the bare planet we call Earth into something approaching the Garden of Eden of holy book fame. But, Beerling tells that tale with great style and a most impressive encyclopaedic mastery of the many disciplines that contribute to that story, botany, palaeontology, geochemistry, climatology, plate tectonics, ecology,...

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Roots holding on to soil
May 15, 2018

Roots create … rock

Plant Cuttings

The more I learn about roots, the more amazing they appear. Not only do they provide essential support for, and anchorage of, the aerial, above-ground, parts of the plant, they are the prime organs for abstracting water and a wide range of chemicals from the soil and transporting those throughout the plant. Furthermore, their ancient and profound association with fungi as mycorrhiza makes one of the most marvellous beneficial mutualisms on the planet. Not only are these root-fungal associations important to continued plant productivity, but they’ve also been implicated as a major driving force in the present-day success and diversity...

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Phylogeny of OVATE family proteins in land plants
November 16, 2014

Phylogeny of OVATE family proteins in land plants

Annals of Botany

The OVATE gene encodes a nuclear-localized regulatory protein belonging to a distinct family of plant-specific proteins known as the OVATE family proteins (OFPs). Liu et al. identify 13 sequenced plant genomes in public databases that represent the major evolutionary lineages of land plants and conduct a phylogenetic analysis based on the alignment of the conserved OVATE domain. Genes for OFPs are found to be present in all the sampled land plant genomes, including the early-diverged lineages, mosses and lycophytes, and 11 subgroups of OFPs are defined in angiosperms. The results provide new insights into the evolution of the OVATE protein...

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