Horsetails and ferns are a monophyletic group and the closest living relatives to seed plants.
Abstract
Most of the 470-million-year history of plants on land belongs to bryophytes, pteridophytes
and gymnosperms, which eventually yielded to the ecological dominance by angiosperms
90 Myr ago. Our knowledge of angiosperm phylogeny, particularly the branching order
of the earliest lineages, has recently been increased by the concurrence of multigene
sequence analyses. However, reconstructing relationships for all the main lineages
of vascular plants that diverged since the Devonian period has remained a challenge.
Here we report phylogenetic analyses of combined data--from morphology and from four
genes--for 35 representatives from all the main lineages of land plants. We show that
there are three monophyletic groups of extant vascular plants: (1) lycophytes, (2)
seed plants and (3) a clade including equisetophytes (horsetails), psilotophytes (whisk
ferns) and all eusporangiate and leptosporangiate ferns. Our maximum-likelihood analysis
shows unambiguously that horsetails and ferns together are the closest relatives to
seed plants. This refutes the prevailing view that horsetails and ferns are transitional
evolutionary grades between bryophytes and seed plants, and has important implications
for our understanding of the development and evolution of plants.
Type
Journal articleSubject
PlantsAngiosperms
Equisetum
Plants, Medicinal
DNA, Plant
Sequence Alignment
Phylogeny
Genes, Plant
Molecular Sequence Data
Biological Evolution
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21818Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1038/35054555Publication Info
Pryer, KM; Schneider, H; Smith, AR; Cranfill, R; Wolf, PG; Hunt, JS; & Sipes, SD (2001). Horsetails and ferns are a monophyletic group and the closest living relatives to
seed plants. Nature, 409(6820). pp. 618-622. 10.1038/35054555. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/21818.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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