Proposed Symposium Title: EVOLUTION OF PLANT SEXUAL REPRODUCTION
Abstract: Early land plants have met the challenge of continuous range expansion, further away from water, always at risk of dehydration. Consequently, also the sexual reproduction of land plants is geared towards independency of water. Several key innovations in sexual reproduction originated in the land plant lineage, such as spores with a rigid outer surface, ovules harboring reduced female gametophytes and a multicellular embryo that is dispersed within seeds in a dehydrated state. However, the evolutionary dynamics and molecular mechanisms underlying these processes are only poorly understood. Knowledge about the evolutionary processes during land plant evolution will contribute to our understanding of how plants succeeded on land and about the conservation of mechanisms in plant sexual reproduction. Both are processes that human subsistence heavily depends on.
Here, we will bring together scientists working in the field of evolution of plant sexual reproduction, to shed light on the molecular mechanisms that drive innovations in plant reproduction. This session is geared towards learning about recent developments on the evolution of key transcription factor families, the gene regulatory networks they are involved and the communication between male and female reproductive structures. This session seeks to bridge large phylogenetic distances with contributions not only from angiosperms, but across 500 Million years of land plant evolution.
Speaker 1: Sabine Zachgo
Institute of Botany, University of Osnabrück, Germany
szachgo@uni-osnabrueck.de
Co-evolution of glutaredoxins and transcription factors in land plant reproduction
Speaker 2: Elvira Hörandl
Institute of Botany, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany
ehoeran@uni-goettingen.de
The evolution of reproductive systems in polyploid flowering plants
Speaker 3: Charlie Scutt
ENS-Lyon, France
Charlie.scutt@ens.lyon.fr
Inferring missing links in the origin of angiosperm reproduction from their ancestralized developmental regulators
Topics (Up to three): Reproductive Biology
Topic 2: Development and Structure
Topic 3: Macroevolution
Justification: Our proposal will bridge several disciplines, such as comparative Plant Reproduction, Macroevolution, Evolution of Development, Population Biology, Comparative Morphology and Omics technologies. In the field of evolution of sexual reproduction, researchers are used to and embrace cross-disciplinary concepts and methods and we thus expect many international research groups interested in our session. We aim to balance this session regarding gender and career stages, such that the three talks to be invited from abstracts should be from early career scientists.
