Marchantia polymorpha L.: An Emerging Model Plant System to Study Contemporary Plant Biology – A Review

Abstract

The liverwort, Marchantia polymorpha L., one of the species of first land plants is a promising model plant system for the analysis of diverse facets of contemporary plant biology. The unique characteristics of the plant such as dominant haploid gametophytic generation enables the isolation and disruption of mutant for genetic analysis, rapid sexual and asexual reproduction can be induced under controlled conditions which leads to the formation of genetically homogenous lines and also the complete organelle genome sequence of chloroplast and mitochondria has been established. In addition, the ongoing whole genome sequencing of M. polymorpha by the community sequencing plan at the Joint Genome Institute specifies the conservation of several mechanisms of biological science that are instituted in other terrestrial plants in a smaller extent of intricacy. Thus, with the development of several feasible and reliable genetic transformation strategies, in vitro cell culture, gene silencing, targeted gene modification and its critical evolutionary position make this plant as a potential model plant to study evolutionary and developmental biology in detail.

Sequence diversity of two chloroplast genes: rps4 and tRNAGly (UCC), in the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha, an emerging plant model system

“…Two species of Marchantia (M. polymorpha L. and M. paleacea Bertol. ), have played a significant role in our understanding of developmental biology and evolutionary studies [4,5,22]. The first species was formally described in Europe, although it has an almost cosmopolitan geographic range.…”

Pteridophyte fungal associations: Current knowledge and future perspectives

“…Looking at cryptogams the only one meeting these criteria as a model to date, is the hornwort Anthoceros agrestis (Szövényi et al, ). Ceratopteris thalictroides (Hickok et al, ; Renzaglia & Warne, ), the moss Physcomitrella patens (Lang et al, ) and the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha (Alam & Pandey, ; Bowman et al, ; Ishizaki et al, ), not to mention Arabidopsis, are all symbiont‐free. Though these absences are almost certainly secondary losses, recent in Marchantia and more ancient in Ceratopteris and Physcomitrella , they are far from ideal for studying the function of signalling network pathways that were present from the dawn of terrestrialization (Wang et al, ).…”