The mosses and flowering plants diverged >400 million years ago. The mosses have haploid-dominant life cycles, whereas the flowering plants are diploid-dominant. The common ancestors of land plants have been inferred to be haploid-dominant, suggesting that genes used in the diploid body of flowering plants were recruited from the genes used in the haploid body of the ancestors during the evolut...

Auxins are hormones involved in many cellular, physiological and developmental processes in seed plants and in mosses such as Physcomitrella patens. Control of auxin levels is achieved in higher plants via synthesis of auxin conjugates by members of the GH3 family. The role of the two GH3-like proteins from P. patens for growth and auxin homeostasis was therefore analysed. The in vivo-function ...

The moss Physcomitrella patens has a great potential as a model system to perform functional studies of plant interacting with microbial pathogens. P. patens is susceptible to fungal and oomycete infection, which colonize and multiply in plant tissues generating disease symptoms. In response to infection, P. patens activates defense mechanisms similar to those induced in flowering plants, inclu...

For decades, plant molecular biology has focused on only a few angiosperm species. Recently, the approximately 500mega base pairs (Mb) of the haploid Physcomitrella patens genome were sequenced and annotated. Mosses such as P. patens occupy a key evolutionary position halfway between green algae and flowering plants. This draft genome, in comparison to existing genome data from other plants, al...

College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing 100048, China (X.Q.W., W.Z.L., Y.H., T.Y.K., Y.K.H.); Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China (X.Q.W., H.C., T.Y.K., S.H.S.); Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824 (P.F.Y.); Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge...

[This corrects the article on p. 1991 in vol. 7, PMID: 28119704.].

The moss Physcomitrella patens has recently emerged as a powerful genetically tractable model plant system. As a member of the bryophytes, P. patens provides a unique opportunity to study the evolution of a myriad of plant traits, such as polarized cell growth, gametophyte-to-sporophyte transitions, and sperm-to-pollen transition. The availability of a complete genome sequence, together with th...

The moss Physcomitrella patens contains high levels of arachidonic acid and lesser amounts of eicosapentaenoic acid. Here we report the identification and characterization of a delta5-desaturase from P. patens that is associated with the synthesis of these fatty acids. A full-length cDNA for this desaturase was identified by data base searches based on homology to sequences of known delta5-desa...

The 70-kD heat shock proteins (Hsp70s) are highly conserved molecular chaperones that play essential roles in cellular processes including abiotic stress responses. Physcomitrella patens serves as a representative of the first terrestrial plants and can recover from serious dehydration. To assess the possible relationship between P. patens Hsp70s and dehydration tolerance, we analyzed the P. pa...

Hamelia patens Jacq. (Rubiaceae) is an ornamental plant grown almost worldwide in warm, moist areas. Firebush is used in herbal medicine to treat athlete’s foot, skin lesions and insect bites, nervous shock, inflammation, rheumatism, headache, asthma, and dysentery. Also, the plants are used in folk medicine against a range of ailments. Present study deals with to establish pharmacognostic, phy...