What is it about?
Plants cannot move away when their surroundings change, so they need to read environmental information and adjust how they grow. In this study, we asked when plants gained the ability to interpret light and temperature together, and whether this ability may have already existed during the early steps of plant terrestrialization (the transition from water to land). By comparing several green plant lineages, from algae to a flowering plant, we found that this capacity became more sophisticated in the lineage that includes land plants and their closest algal relatives. We also found that land plants use a conserved molecular “control system” for this process, while different plant lineages have rewired its outputs in their own ways.
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Why is it important?
The move from water to land was one of the major transitions in plant evolution. On land, plants faced more variable and unpredictable conditions, including stronger changes in light and temperature. Our work suggests that the ability to interpret these signals together may not have appeared only after plants became terrestrial, but may have already existed in the ancestors or close relatives of early land plants. What is unique about this study is that it connects a molecular mechanism of environmental sensing with a key evolutionary transition. It also shows how evolution can preserve a core regulatory system while allowing each lineage to develop its own flexible responses.
Perspectives
From my perspective, the most exciting message of this publication is that terrestrialization may have relied not only on the invention of new structures, but also on the use and rewiring of pre-existing regulatory capacities. In other words, plants may have carried part of this environmental interpretation system with them as they moved onto land, rather than inventing it entirely afterward. I find this particularly interesting because it shows a balance between stability and flexibility: the same core components can be conserved over long evolutionary times, while their downstream targets and growth responses can diversify. This opens new questions about how ancient regulatory systems helped plants adapt to life on land and to changing environments more broadly.
Miguel Blazquez
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Conserved regulatory core and lineage-specific diversification of light–temperature integration in plants, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2601574123.
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