Two papers were published this January in the journal Arctoa.
Buck W. R. & B. Goffinet. 2015. Larrainia, a new genus of Amblystegiaceae from the Cape Horn region of Chile. Arctoa 24: 27–31. doi: 10.15298/arctoa.24.05
Ignatov, M.S., E.A. Ignatova, I.V. Czernyadjeva, B. Goffinet, O.I. Kuznetsova & V.E. Fedosov. 2015. Afoninia, a new moss genus of Funariaceae from Transbaikalia (East Siberia, Russia). Arctoa 24: 14–20. doi: 10.15298/arctoa.24.02
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet honored participant of the International Association of Bryologists meeting in January 2015 in Puerto William, subantarctic Chile, by attending the inauguration of the conference. In her address she announced further support for scientific research in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve through the construction of a new research and education station in Puerto Williams. At the cocktail following the inauguration, Lily had an opportunity to introduce herself to the President.
Lily’s work on the potential role of migratory birds in the expansion of geographic ranges of sporic plants, fungi and algae is featured in a Chilean news paper. Click on Lily_Chile_news.
The study by Laenen et al. on patterns of diversification of bryophytes through time is now published: Laenen B., B. Shaw, H. Schneider, B. Goffinet, E. Paradis, A. Désamoré, J. Heinrichs, J.C. Villarreal, R. Gradstein, S. McDaniel, D. Long, L. Forrest, M. Hollingsworth, B. Crandall-Stotler, C. Davis, J. Engel, M. von Konrat, D. Cooper, J. Patiño, C.J. Cox, A. Vanderpoorten & A.J. Shaw. Extant diversity of bryophytes emerged from successive post-Mesozoic diversification bursts. Nature Communications 5, Article number: 5134.
Abstract: Unraveling the macroevolutionary history of bryophytes, which arose soon after the origin of land plants but exhibit substantially lower species richness than the more recently derived angiosperms, has been challenged by the scarce fossil record. Here we demonstrate that overall estimates of net species diversification are approximately half those reported in ferns and ∼30% those described for angiosperms. Nevertheless, statistical rate analyses on time-calibrated large-scale phylogenies reveal that mosses and liverworts underwent bursts of diversification since the mid-Mesozoic. The diversification rates further increase in specific lineages towards the Cenozoic to reach, in the most recently derived lineages, values that are comparable to those reported in angiosperms. This suggests that low diversification rates do not fully account for current patterns of bryophyte species richness, and we hypothesize that, as in gymnosperms, the low extant bryophyte species richness also results from massive extinctions.
Lily’s first dissertation chapter is published in the Journal of Biogeography.
Lewis L.R., R. Rozzi & B. Goffinet. 2014. Direct long-distance dispersal shapes a New World amphitropical disjunction in the dispersal-limited dung moss Tetraplodon (Bryopsida: Splachnaceae). Journal of Biogeography 41: 2385–2395.
See details here
Lily (Ph.D. candidate) recently returned from Nepal and is now leaving for PNG on Wednesday July 23 to join an international group of biologists to study “Community composition of bryophyte and fern assemblages along an elevational gradients in Papua New Guinea”. What an experience!
The Project Investigators on the project are: Dr. Dirk Nikolaus Karger (University of Zurich, Switzerland), Dr. Marcus Lehnert (University of Bonn, Germany), Prof. Dr. Vojtech Novotny (The New Guinea Binatang Research Center), Dr. Michael Sundue (University of Vermont, USA), Dr. Boon-Chuan Ho (The SING Herbarium, Singapore), Sarah Noben, Msc. (University of Zurich, Switzerland), Karola Maul, Msc. (University of Bonn, Germany).
The study by Liu Y., C.J. Cox, W. Wang & B. Goffinet, entitled “Mitochondrial Phylogenomics of Early Land Plants: Mitigating the Effects of Saturation, Compositional Heterogeneity, and Codon-usage Bias” is published in Systematic Biology 63: 862–878.
Abstract: Phylogenetic analyses using concatenation of genomic-scale data have been seen as the panacea for resolving the incongruences among inferences from few or single genes. However, phylogenomics may also suffer from systematic errors, due to the, perhaps cumulative, effects of saturation, among-taxa compositional (GC content) heterogeneity, or codon-usage bias plaguing the individual nucleotide loci that are concatenated. Here we provide an example of how these factors affect the inferences of the phylogeny of early land plants based on mitochondrial genomic data. Mitochondrial sequences evolve slowly in plants and hence are thought to be suitable for resolving deep relationships. We newly assembled mitochondrial genomes from 20 bryophytes, complemented these with 40 other streptophytes (land plants plus algal outgroups), compiling a data matrix of 60 taxa and 41 mitochondrial genes. Homogeneous analyses of the concatenated nucleotide data resolve mosses as sister-group to the remaining land plants. However, the corresponding translated amino acid data support the liverwort lineage in this position. Both results receive weak to moderate support in maximum likelihood analyses, but strong support in Bayesian inferences. Tests of alternative hypotheses using either nucleotide or amino-acid data provide implicit support for their respective optimal topologies, and clearly reject the hypotheses that bryophytes are monophyletic, liverworts and mosses share a unique common ancestor, or hornworts are sister to the remaining land plants. We determined that land plant lineages differ in their nucleotide composition, and in their usage of synonymous codon variants. Composition heterogeneous Bayesian analyses employing a non-stationary model that accounts for variation in among-lineage composition, and inferences from degenerated nucleotide data that avoids the effects of synonymous substitutions that underlie codon-usage bias, again recovered liverworts being sister to the remaining land plants but without support. These analyses indicate that the inference of an early-branching moss lineage based on the nucleotide data is caused by convergent compositional biases. Accommodating among-site amino acid compositional heterogeneity (CAT-model) yields no support for the optimal resolution of liverwort as sister to the rest of land plants, suggesting that the robust inference of the liverwort position in homogeneous analyses may be due in part to compositional biases among sites. All analyses support a paraphyletic bryophytes with hornworts composing the sister group to tracheophytes. We conclude that while genomic data may generate highly supported phylogenetic trees, these inferences may be artifacts. We suggest that phylogenomic analyses should assess the possible impact of potential biases through comparisons of protein-coding gene data and their amino-acid translations by evaluating the impact of substitutional saturation, synonymous substitutions, and compositional biases through data deletion strategies and by analyzing the data using heterogeneous composition models. We caution against relying on any one presentation of the data (nucleotide or amino acid) or any one type of analysis even when analyzing large-scale data sets, no matter how well-supported, without fully exploring the effects of substitution models.
Liu Y., R. Medina & B. Goffinet. 350 million years of mitochondrial genome stasis in mosses, an early land plant lineage. Molecular Biology and Evolution 31: 2586–2591.
Abstract: Among land plants, angiosperms have the structurally most labile mitochondrial (mt) genomes. In contrast, the so-called early land plants (e.g., mosses) seem to have completely static mt chromosomes. We assembled the complete mt genomes from 12 mosses spanning the moss tree of life, to assess 1) the phylogenetic depth of the conserved mt gene content and order and 2) the correlation between scattered sequence repeats and gene order lability in land plants. The mt genome of most mosses is approximately 100 kb in size, and thereby the smallest among land plants. Based on divergence time estimates, moss mt genome structure has remained virtually frozen for 350 My, with only two independent gene losses and a single gene relocation detected across the macroevolutionary tree. This is the longest period of mt genome stasis demonstrated to date in a plant lineage. The complete lack of intergenic repeat sequences, considered to be essential for intragenomic recombinations, likely accounts for the evolutionary stability of moss mt genomes.
Lily, Emily and co. published the results of their screening of migratory bird feathers for diaspores:
First evidence of bryophyte diaspores in the plumage of transequatorial migrant birds
It is featured by Science magazine, the BBC, Le Figaro (France), …
Congratulations to Lily and Emily.
Media coverage:
http://focusingonwildlife.com/news/plants-hitch-a-lift-on-migrating-birds/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/15/plants-hitchhike-birds_n_5492433.html
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2014/06/13/stories/1060001256
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/06/plants-hitchhike-wings-birds
http://news.discovery.com/animals/tiny-plants-travel-around-the-world-via-bird-wings-140611.htm
http://phys.org/news/2014-06-tiny-coattails-migratory-birds.html
http://www.sciencecodex.com/tiny_plants_ride_on_the_coattails_of_migratory_birds-135530
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/27798623
http://newsongreen.org/tiny-plants-ride-on-the-coattails-of-migratory-birds/
http://www.sciencenewsline.com/articles/2014061219030033.html
http://dannyboston.blogspot.com/2014/06/tiny-plants-travel-around-world-via.html
http://today.uconn.edu/blog/2014/06/migratory-birds-help-spread-plant-species-uconn-study/
http://saypeople.com/2014/06/12/tiny-plants-ride-on-the-coattails-of-migratory-birds/#axzz34SptNDU2
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140612085339.htm
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2014/06/12/tiny.plants.ride.coattails.migratory.birds
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-06/p-tpr060514.php
http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-1208826-805630.html
http://www.uux.cn/viewnews-61378.html
http://www.zmnh.com/html/6539.htm
http://www.tcxqw.com/news/201406/13971.html
http://www.bio1000.com/reseach/environment/499791.html