Mosses: Accessible Systems for Plant Development Studies

Abstract

Mosses are a cosmopolitan group of land plants, sister to vascular plants, with a high potential for molecular and cell biological research. The species Physcomitrium patens has helped gaining better understanding of the biological processes of the plant cell, and it has become a central system to understand water-to-land plant transition through 2D-to-3D growth transition, regulation of asymmetric cell division, shoot apical cell establishment and maintenance, phyllotaxis and regeneration. P. patens was the first fully sequenced moss in 2008, with the latest annotated release in 2018. It has been shown that many gene functions and networks are conserved in mosses when compared to angiosperms. Importantly, this model organism has a simplified and accessible body structure that facilitates close tracking in time and space with the support of live cell imaging set-ups and multiple reporter lines. This has become possible thanks to its fully established molecular toolkit, with highly efficient PEG-assisted, CRISPR/Cas9 and RNAi transformation and silencing protocols, among others. Here we provide examples on how mosses exhibit advantages over vascular plants to study several processes and their future potential to answer some other outstanding questions in plant cell biology.

Divergence of trafficking and polarization mechanisms for PIN auxin transporters during land plant evolution

“…For transgenic lines with inducible overexpression by moss, the insertion site of the GFP gene into the HL was indicated in Figure 3A, and the PIN-GFP regions were amplified from previously generated plasmids (Zhang et al, 2019) by PCR and cloned into the gateway entry plasmid pENTR/D-TOPO ® as the manufacturer suggested. The fragments were sub-cloned into the pPGX8 vector, which contains a p 35S driven β-estradiol inducible XVE cassette (Floriach-Clark et al, 2021; Kubo et al, 2013; Nakaoka et al, 2012) via a Gateway ® LR reaction (Invitrogen) as the manufacture’s recommendation.…”