2006/10/09 by Yin‐Long Qiu, Libo Li, Bin Wang +18 · 666 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Bryophyte Studies and Records #Plant Taxonomy and Phylogenetics #Plant Diversity and Evolution #Biology #Phylogenetic tree #Genome #Sporophyte #Evolutionary biology #Phylogenomics #Ploidy #Sister group #Chloroplast DNA #Phylogenetics #Taxon #Maximum parsimony #Plant evolution #Reticulate evolution #Botany #Gene #Genetics #Clade
paper · open access · doi:10.1073/pnas.0603335103
published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(42), 15511-15516 (National Academy of Sciences)
openalex publication_date 2006/10/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Phylogenetic relationships among the four major lineages of land plants (liverworts, mosses, hornworts, and vascular plants) remain vigorously contested; their resolution is essential to our understanding of the origin and early evolution of land plants. We analyzed three different complementary data sets: a multigene supermatrix, a genomic structural character matrix, and a chloroplast genome sequence matrix, using maximum likelihood, maximum parsimony, and compatibility methods. Analyses of all three data sets strongly supported liverworts as the sister to all other land plants, and analyses of the multigene and chloroplast genome matrices provided moderate to strong support for hornworts as the sister to vascular plants. These results highlight the important roles of liverworts and hornworts in two major events of plant evolution: the water-to-land transition and the change from a haploid gametophyte generation-dominant life cycle in bryophytes to a diploid sporophyte generation-dominant life cycle in vascular plants. This study also demonstrates the importance of using a multifaceted approach to resolve difficult nodes in the tree of life. In particular, it is shown here that densely sampled taxon trees built with multiple genes provide an indispensable test of taxon-sparse trees inferred from genome sequences.