Insights into Land Plant Evolution Garnered from the Marchantia polymorpha Genome.

The evolution of land flora transformed the terrestrial environment. Land plants evolved from an ancestral charophycean alga from which they inherited developmental, biochemical, and cell biological attributes. Additional biochemical and physiological adaptations to land, and a life cycle with an alternation between multicellular haploid and diploid generations that facilitated efficient dispersal of desiccation tolerant spores, evolved in the ancestral land plant.

Cytrap Marker Systems for In Vivo Visualization of Cell Cycle Progression in Arabidopsis.

This chapter focuses on visualization of cell cycle progression in plant tissues using the dual-color marker system "Cytrap." The Cytrap line carries a part of Arabidopsis CDT1a fused to the red fluorescent protein (RFP) gene, which monitors the cell cycle phases from S to late G2 or early mitosis, and the G2/M-specific cyclin B1 marker fused to the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene. We introduce growth conditions of Arabidopsis roots, the setup for microscopic observation, and analysis of obtained images.

A dual-color marker system for in vivo visualization of cell cycle progression in Arabidopsis.

Visualization of the spatiotemporal pattern of cell division is crucial to understand how multicellular organisms develop and how they modify their growth in response to varying environmental conditions. The mitotic cell cycle consists of four phases: S (DNA replication), M (mitosis and cytokinesis), and the intervening G1 and G2 phases; however, only G2/M-specific markers are currently available in plants, making it difficult to measure cell cycle duration and to analyze changes in cell cycle progression in living tissues. Here, we developed another cell cycle marker that labels S-phase cells by manipulating Arabidopsis CDT1a, which functions in DNA replication origin licensing.