Genetics and Genomics of Physcomitrella patens

For about a century, spanning the eras of early genetics to state-of-the-art biotechnology, the moss Physcomitrella patens has been a popular object of biological research. Meanwhile it has become an established model organism in plant evolutionary and developmental biology, mainly due to a combination of two factors: its phylogenetic key position in the plant tree of life and the sum of its favorable biological features. As a member of an early diverging land plant lineage – the bryophytes – Physcomitrella fills the gap between other models of the green lineage such as aquatic algae and flowering plants. The advantages of small stature and short generation cycles, accompanied by established and reliable cultivation techniques provide researchers with a robust, relatively fast, and easy cultivation for experiments in a laboratory environment. Precise genome engineering is enabled by the moss’s haploid-dominant lifestyle and its specifically high rate of homologous recombination during DNA repair, that is routinely utilized through an extensive molecular toolkit for efficient gene targeting since 1998. Physcomitrella’s genome was sequenced about a decade ago, making it the first bryophyte and even one of the first plants to be chosen for such a wholegenome shotgun sequencing approach. Ever since, the annotation of this “flagship genome” has been subject to constant improvement by an active community through the internet resource cosmoss.org which provides a central platform for knowledge exchange as well as bioinformatics data and tools. N. van Gessel • D. Lang Plant Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] R. Reski (*) Plant Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany FRIAS – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Freiburg, Germany BIOSS – Centre for Biological Signalling Studies, Freiburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 S. Assmann, B. Liu (eds.), Plant Cell Biology, The Plant Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-7881-2_22-1 1