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The origin and evolution of phototropins.
Abstract
Plant phototropism, the ability to bend toward or away from light, is predominantly
controlled by blue-light photoreceptors, the phototropins. Although phototropins have
been well-characterized in Arabidopsis thaliana, their evolutionary history is largely
unknown. In this study, we complete an in-depth survey of phototropin homologs across
land plants and algae using newly available transcriptomic and genomic data. We show
that phototropins originated in an ancestor of Viridiplantae (land plants + green
algae). Phototropins repeatedly underwent independent duplications in most major land-plant
lineages (mosses, lycophytes, ferns, and seed plants), but remained single-copy genes
in liverworts and hornworts-an evolutionary pattern shared with another family of
photoreceptors, the phytochromes. Following each major duplication event, the phototropins
differentiated in parallel, resulting in two specialized, yet partially overlapping,
functional forms that primarily mediate either low- or high-light responses. Our detailed
phylogeny enables us to not only uncover new phototropin lineages, but also link our
understanding of phototropin function in Arabidopsis with what is known in Adiantum
and Physcomitrella (the major model organisms outside of flowering plants). We propose
that the convergent functional divergences of phototropin paralogs likely contributed
to the success of plants through time in adapting to habitats with diverse and heterogeneous
light conditions.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/10800Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.3389/fpls.2015.00637Publication Info
Li, F; Rothfels, CJ; Melkonian, M; Villarreal, JC; Stevenson, DW; Graham, SW; ...
Pryer, KM (2015). The origin and evolution of phototropins. Front Plant Sci, 6. pp. 637. 10.3389/fpls.2015.00637. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/10800.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Kathleen M. Pryer
Professor of Biology

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