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    Home > Food News > Food Articles > Scientists believe that land plants may have been born 500 million years ago

    Scientists believe that land plants may have been born 500 million years ago

    • Last Update: 2021-03-08
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    plant scientists once believed that moss was the most primitive living plant. Photo The Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences
    thanks to land plants providing breathable oxygen. Now people have a better understanding of when they first went to land. Although the oldest known fossils of land plants are 420 million years old, researchers now conclude that the green algae layer first landed nearly 100 million years earlier.
    " study has important global implications because we know that early plants cooled the climate and increased oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere. Tim Lenton, a geosyscientise scientist at the University of Exeter in the UK who was not involved in the study, said these conditions supported the expansion of life on land.
    for decades, biologists have been trying to come up with a reliable date for the birth of land plants. However, due to the lack of spines and hard shells, plants leave little information in the fossil record, so researchers suspect that even the oldest plant fossils do not represent the earliest plant groups.
    some scientists have tried to use plant genetic data as a "molecular clock" to shed light on their evolutionary history - knowing a specific mutation rate can estimate how long ago each species was separated based on differences in plant DNA. However, researchers have not been clear about the lowest, or earliest, branch of the plant family tree. On this basis, tube plants, including the most familiar trees, crops, and flowers, were born at some point after the emergence of moss, horn moss, and ferns. However, the order in which the last three populations appear has remained an unsolvest mystery, hampering the study of molecular clocks.
    Donoghue, a professor of computing, believes that if you have enough computing power, you can solve the puzzle. Donoghue, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, and colleagues started with genetic data collected on more than 100 plant and algae species. Using several types of analysis, they tested each arrangement of four plant population relationships and took into account the age of more than a dozen plant fossils as a realistic verification.
    Donoghue and colleagues report in the recently published
    that the exact configuration of the family tree foundations of plants has nothing to do with tracing the earliest land plants. All analyses show that land plants first appeared during the Camura period about 500 million years ago. At that time, the development of multicellular animal species had begun.
    Lenton argues that the latest analysis "shows that the earliest land plants appeared earlier than previously thought, and that this is not related to the current uncertainty about which land plants evolved in the first place".
    Donoghue team also applied computing power to address these uncertainties. Plant scientists once considered moss to be the most primitive living plant because of its lack of roots and pores for gas and moisture exchange. But some new research suggests that moss-like plants are not the earliest tees. Now, Donoghue agrees. He believed that moss was most closely associated with ferns and once had roots and pores, but lost those features over time. The team reported the findings in the journal Current Biology.
    " has long assumed that the ancestors of all plants were physiologically similar to moss. Donoghue said, but his team's analysis suggests that the ancestor may have initial roots and pores, so it may have grown better and processed more soil and carbon dioxide, with a greater impact on geogeochemistry on The Earth than researchers have long thought.
    "It's good to see that they've come to the same conclusions about moss as we do." Jim Leebens-Mack, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Georgia in the United States, said. He helped collect data from Donoghue for the latest analysis.
    Leebens-Mack also praised the study of when land plants appeared as the most in-depth study to date. Pamela Soltis, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Florida, argues that if Donoghue's results are correct, "it changes the entire timeline of the origin of life on land and the subsequent evolutionary shift in plant and related animal populations." At the same time, "these earlier dates mean that the Earth may change more slowly than we think."
    Leebens-Mack remains cautious. Molecular clock analysis, he argues, always produces older dates, so "I've always had reservations about these estimates". (Source: Science Network Xu Xu)
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