Marchantia with gemmae cups near Bogor Indonesia

A first comprehensive analysis of the Marchantia genome was published today in Cell. Marchantia is a thalloid liverwort, a representative of a lineage of land plants that is among the earliest diverging groups of land plants. The relationships among ‘bryophytes’ (i.e., haploid dominant land-plants, including liverworts, hornworts, and mosses) remains uncertain, but liverworts are a strong contender as the outgroup to all other land plants. Whatever the details of bryophyte phylogeny, the publication of the Marchantia genome is exciting both because of its phylogenetic placement and its potential as a plant model system. Caren Chang, Charlie Goodman, and I wrote a companion “Preview” for cell putting the Marchantia genome into perspective: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1VqulL7PXQuX7

The PDF of our preview is here: Delwiche et al. 2017 Marchantia Preview-1r7btxi, and the article about the Marchantia genome is here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.09.030