The maintenance of genetic diversity and stochastic losses of diversity during periods of small population size have become major points of concern in conservation biology. However, empirical research on random evolutionary processes in natural plant populations is still scarce and is reviewed here in comparison to our case study on Dryopteris cristata. Detailed recent population histories of t...

The phototropins constitute an important class of plant photoreceptor kinases that control a range of physiological responses, including phototropism, light-directed chloroplast movement, and light-induced stomatal opening. The LOV2 domain of phototropin binds a molecule of flavin mononucleotide (FMN) and undergoes a photocycle involving light-driven covalent adduct formation between a conserve...

We investigated the responses of stomata to light in the fern Adiantum capillus-veneris, a typical species of Leptosporangiopsida. Stomata in the intact leaves of the sporophytes opened in response to red light, but they did not open when blue light was superimposed on the red light. The results were confirmed in the isolated Adiantum epidermis. The red light-induced stomatal response was not a...

Exactly 100 years ago, F.R. Lillie reported chemotaxis in animal sperm for the first time (Lillie, 1912). Chemo-taxis refers to the directed movement of a cell or organism to the source of a chemical gradient; the chemical agent that elicits this movement is called a chemoattrac-tant. Chemotaxis had previously been shown by Pfeffer (1884) for fern spermatozoids; however, attempts to demonstrate...

Phytochromes are plant photoreceptors important for development and adaptation to the environment. Phytochrome A (PHYA) is essential for the far-red (FR) high-irradiance responses (HIRs), which are of particular ecological relevance as they enable plants to establish under shade conditions. PHYA and HIRs have been considered unique to seed plants because the divergence of seed plants and crypto...

The distinct distribution and abundance of C-to-U and U-to-C RNA editing among land plants suggest that these two processes originated and evolve independently, but the paucity of information from several key lineages limits our understanding of their evolution. To examine the evolutionary diversity of RNA editing among ferns, we sequenced the plastid transcriptomes from two early diverging spe...