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Science 8 June 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5830, pp. 1477 - 1480
DOI: 10.1126/science.1142618
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Reports

An Ancient Mechanism Controls the Development of Cells with a Rooting Function in Land Plants

Benoît Menand,1 Keke Yi,1,2 Stefan Jouannic,1* Laurent Hoffmann,1{dagger} Eoin Ryan,1 Paul Linstead,1 Didier G. Schaefer,3{ddagger} Liam Dolan1§

Root hairs and rhizoids are cells with rooting functions in land plants. We describe two basic helix-loop-helix transcription factors that control root hair development in the sporophyte (2n) of the angiosperm Arabidopsis thaliana and rhizoid development in the gametophytes (n) of the bryophyte Physcomitrella patens. The phylogeny of land plants supports the hypothesis that early land plants were bryophyte-like and possessed a dominant gametophyte and later the sporophyte rose to dominance. If this hypothesis is correct, our data suggest that the increase in morphological complexity of the sporophyte body in the Paleozoic resulted at least in part from the recruitment of regulatory genes from gametophyte to sporophyte.

1 Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, John Innes Centre, Norwich NR47UH, UK.
2 State Key Laboratory of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry, College of Life Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, P. R. China.
3 Département de Biologie Moléculaire Végétale, Université de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.

* Present address: Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, UMR 1098 Biologie du Développement des Espèces Pérennes Cultivées, 911 avenue Agropolis, F-34394 Montpellier Cedex 5, France.

{dagger} Present address: UMR CNRS/UPS 5546, Surfaces Cellulaires et Signalisation chez les Végétaux, Pôle de Biotechnologies végétales, 24 chemin de Borde-Rouge, F-31326 Castanet-Tolosan, France.

{ddagger} Present address: Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin, Statìon de Génétique et Amélioration des Plantes, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique Versailles, Route de Saint Cyr, F-78000 Versailles, France.

§ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: liam.dolan{at}bbsrc.ac.uk

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