Jan de Vries: Plant terrestrialization and the deep evolutionary origin of streptopyhte stress response networks

The colonization of land by plants was a singular evolutionary event that transformed Earth’s biosphere. Land plants originated from streptophyte algae; the early land pioneers faced fluctuating stresses such as rapid changes in light and temperature—and continue to face them to this day. With the availability of genomes from algae closely related to land plants, insights into the genetic basis of stress responses are emerging, though the functional roles of these components remain unclear. By combining environmental gradient and time-course stress experiments with transcriptomic, metabolite, and proteomic analyses across diverse streptophytes, we identified conserved gene networks that reveal ancient convergence in stress signaling. These shared genetic hubs highlight strategies for stress adaptation that arose more than 600 million years ago, long before plants first colonized land. I will present current perspectives on the evolutionary origins of embryophyte stress-response networks and how they enabled the successful establishment of plants on terra firma.