Small plants that reveal big secrets – Faculty of Science and Engineering

Two studies recently published by a research team including Professor Juan Carlos Villarreal of Laval University demonstrate that modest, little-known plants can provide valuable fundamental knowledge about the evolution of life on Earth and inspire innovations that enable to increase agricultural production.

The plants in question are hornworts, a group related to the first plants that left the aquatic environment to settle on dry land 500 million years ago. “Even today, hornworts have characteristics that are present in algae, but which are not found in other land plants,” emphasizes Juan Carlos Villarreal, professor in the Department of Biology, member of the Institute of Biology integrative and systems and curator of the Louis-Marie Herbarium at Laval University.

So far, scientists have identified 223 species of hornworts around the world, but as they are little studied, this would be an underestimate, specifies the researcher. Quebec is home to 4 species of hornworts whose populations, concentrated in southern Quebec, are not very abundant.

With the team of Professor Fay-Wei Li, from Cornell University, Professor Villarreal studied the genomes of 10 species belonging to different families of hornworts to better understand how they had evolved from their common ancestor. These 10 species separated 300 million years ago, but, unlike several other groups of land plants, their chromosomes have remained surprisingly stable, this team reports in Nature Plants.

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