Evolution of response to hypoxia in the plant kingdom

ABSTRACT: Molecular oxygen (O2) is necessary for plant metabolic and physiological processes. Land plants have successfully adapted to a range of habitats characterised by very different dynamics of O2 availability. O2 sensing has been mainly characterised in angiosperms, where it is mediated by the N-Cys branch of the N-degron pathway. We aimed to characterise the transcriptional response to limited oxygen availability (hypoxia) in non-seed plants. We set out to compare the transcriptional response to hypoxia in a range of species that recapitulate the major events in the evolution of land plants: M. polymorpha for Hepatophyta, P. patens for Bryophyta, S. moellendorffii for Lycophyta, E. hyemale and P. vittata for eusporangiate and leptosporangiate Monilophyta. Given the differences in each division’s life cycle, we selected the developmental phase that includes the main photosynthetically active organs, to enable comparability of tissues with similar metabolic features. Therefore, we treated mature sporophytes of Marchantia (n), Selaginella (2n), Equisetum (2n) and Pteris (2n) with 1% O2 in the dark for 8 h, while we subjected Physcomitrium gametophores to the same treatment. Controls were maintained under aerobic conditions (21% O2) in the dark. We extracted total mRNAs and sequenced them using the Illumina technology (cit.) to identify differentially expressed genes. We compared the effect of hypoxia on these five species with the datasets available for photosynthetic sporophytes of angiosperms, Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa . We observed a different extent of response for these species, where P. patens exhibited the mildest changes, in terms of both number of DEGs and extent of up- and down-regulation. In contrast, Arabidopsis and Rice showed a strong response to the treatment.

ORGANISM(S): Selaginella moellendorffii Equisetum hyemale Pteris vittata Marchantia polymorpha Physcomitrium patens

PROVIDER: GSE270814 | GEO | 2025/05/31

REPOSITORIES: GEO