Abstract

Kenneth Sporne Lecture

Vascular plants are the most diverse lineage of land plants alive today encompassing a plethora of botanical form spanning creeping lycophytes and ferns, towering gymnosperms and flamboyant flowering plants. For a lineage with such diversity today, the group had a surprisingly humble origin over 430 million years ago. The first vascular plants were minute in size, consisting of tiny branching twigs lacking leaves and roots. However, just 50 million years after these earliest vascular plants were taking hold on the terrestrial surface the group had already exploded in diversity leading to the formation of the first forests. What enabled this remarkable explosion of vascular plant diversity and the origin of key features such as roots, leaves and wood remains a key question in plant evolutionary biology. The goal for my work is to shed light on this question and help establish what developmental innovations underpinned this explosion in vascular plants. We do this by taking an interdisciplinary approach, combing studies of fossil plants with the investigation of developmental and genetic networks in living species. In the talk I will describe our ongoing work to uncover the origin of sugar transport in plants and the independent origins of plant leaves.