Evolution of developmental mechanisms in plants.

As our understanding of developmental mechanisms in flowering plant species has become more advanced, an appreciation of the need to understand how distinct plant morphologies are generated has grown. This has led to an awareness of the key morphological differences in distinct land plant groups and to an assessment of the major innovations that occurred during land plant evolution. Recent advances demonstrate how developmental toolkits have been recruited for related purposes in different land plant groups, but the limited number of examples highlights both the infancy of the field and the difficulty of working with non-flowering plants.