Genome-Wide Comparison of Developmental Genes in Land Plants

Abstract

Land plants landed around 480 million years ago. The evolution of developmental genes in land plants is still a challenging issue, because genome information was only available in angiosperms, which originated around 200 million years ago. Recently, whole genomes of the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, the moss Physcomitrella patens, and the lycopod Selaginella moellendorffii were mostly sequenced and genome-wide comparisons of developmental genes became possible. We used 700 Arabidopsis thaliana developmental genes as queries and searched homologous genes in other organisms. Phylogenetic trees of the homologs were constructed using the neighbor-joining and maximum likelihood methods, and the existence of potential orthologous genes was examined. Conservation and divergence of developmental genes in land plants will be discussed.