The evolutionary development of plant body plans

Karl J. Niklas; Ulrich Kutschera

doi:10.1071/FP09107

EVOLUTIONARY REVIEW

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The evolutionary development of plant body plans

Karl J. Niklas ^A ^C and Ulrich Kutschera ^B

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Department of Plant Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.

^B Institute of Biology, University of Kassel, Heinrich-Plett-Strasse 40, D-34109 Kassel, Germany.

^C Corresponding author. Email: kjn2@cornell.edu

This paper is part of an ongoing series: ‘The Evolution of Plant Functions’.

Functional Plant Biology 36(8) 682-695 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP09107
Submitted: 12 May 2009 Accepted: 12 June 2009 Published: 23 July 2009

Abstract

Evolutionary developmental biology, cladistic analyses, and paleontological insights make it increasingly clear that regulatory mechanisms operating during embryogenesis and early maturation tend to be highly conserved over great evolutionary time scales, which can account for the conservative nature of the body plans in the major plant and animal clades. At issue is whether morphological convergences in body plans among evolutionarily divergent lineages are the result of adaptive convergence or ‘genome recall’ and ‘process orthology’. The body plans of multicellular photosynthetic eukaryotes (‘plants’) are reviewed, some of their important developmental/physiological regulatory mechanisms discussed, and the evidence that some of these mechanisms are phyletically ancient examined. We conclude that endosymbiotic lateral gene transfers, gene duplication and functional divergence, and the co-option of ancient gene networks were key to the evolutionary divergence of plant lineages.

Additional keywords: apogamy, apospory, auxin, endosymbiosis, euphyllophytes, floral identity genes, homeodomain genes, MADS-box genes, plant evolution, TIR1.

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