Reproductive Strategies in Bryophytes

Abstract

IntroductionBryophytes are the second largest group of plants after angiosperms and deserve a much more important place than they have today in biological research. They remained a neglected group of plants until the recent past in spite of their importance as model organisms in macroevolutionary population genetics and especially ecological research. Currently, Physcomitrella patens is one of the fi rst bryophytes model organisms in genomic studies with faster life cycle than Arabidopsis and is particularly advantageous because of dominant gametophyte generation. This is increasingly used for studies on development and molecular evolutionary aspects of plants. To our knowledge, this is the only nonvascular primitive plant with its genome completely sequenced. Moreover, it is currently the only land plant with effi cient gene targeting that enables gene knockout. The resulting knockout mosses are stored and distributed by the International Moss Stock Centre. Recent researches have shown the importance of mosses in transgenic pharmaceuticals production. Among its many assets, P. patens is able to produce human proteins (Hohe et al. 2002 ;Decker et al. 2003 ;Stefan et al. 2008 ) and is the only plant known used to produce the blood-clotting factor IX for pharmaceutical use. AbstractThe chapter deals with the reproductive strategies in bryophytes: both asexual and sexual reproduction, fertilization and the reasons for the failure and their further development. The various factors involved in reproduction and their effects on reproductive biology with brief information on cladistic and molecular studies on phylogeny of bryophytes based on literature are provided.