Systematic analysis of transcription factors in Marchantia polymorpha

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Transcription factors are major regulators for various biological processes including development and environmental responses. Arabidopsis thaliana and Physcomitrella patens have 2,000 and 1,200 transcription factors, respectively. The liverwort Marchantia polymorpha is an emerging model organism for developmental and evolutional studies. M. polymorpha occupies a crucial position in the evolution of land plant and has the haploid-dominant life cycle, which provides advantages over diploid plants for molecular genetic analysis. In this study, we identified ca. 300 transcription factors in M. polymorpha by searching our EST and RNA-sequence databases that include more than 20,000 genes. Surprisingly, M. polymorpha had 38 transcription factor families that are common numbers with A. thaliana. These results indicate that redundancy of transcription factors in M. polymorpha should be very low and that M. polymoroha provides suitable system for genetic analysis.