Evolution and Development of the Earliest Land Plant Rooting Systems
Abstract. The evolution of the first rooting systems some time before 400 million years was a key innovation that occurred when the first complex multicellular eukaryotic photosynthetic organisms – plants – colonized the land. The evolution of land plants resulted in dramatic changes to the Earth System. For example, changes in the Carbon Cycle contributed to dramatic global cooling between 470 and 300 million years ago.
Rooting systems are important for land plants because they facilitate the uptake of most chemical elements that are required for growth, water update and anchorage. The rooting systems of the earliest diverging group of extant land plants comprised unicellular tip-growing filaments called rhizoids and are morphologically similar to cells that develop at the interface between the plant and the soil in vascular plants – root hairs. Subsequently specialized axes – multicellular structures that develop from self-renewing populations of cells called meristems – with evolved that carry out rooting function.
A major aim of our research is to use fossils and genes to understand key events in the evolution of land plant rooting systems. Fossils demonstrate the variety of forms that existed and how these forms developed. We have identified the oldest rooting structures with meristems. Genetics has allowed us to define the regulatory mechanisms that controlled the development of the first land plant root system and demonstrate how these mechanisms changed during the course of evolution. This positive regulatory mechanism is preserved in most land extant plant lineages. By contrast, negative regulatory components of the mechanism evolved independently in different lineages and some are more than 300 million years old.
By combining evidence from paleontology, genetics and development we can construct a picture for the evolution of rooting systems in the 100 million years after plants colonized the land and radiated across the continental surfaces.