400 Million Years of Food Transport in Plants: unearthing the origin, diversity and genetic toolkit of vasculature

植物在身体周围运输糖，这种特殊的组织被称为韧皮部。韧皮部是植物生命所必需的，是所有重要经济植物的生长和生存的基础，无论是农作物还是森林物种。鉴于韧皮部对植物生命的重要性，可以预测我们将对其进化有一个很好的了解。然而，尽管韧皮部在现存物种中扮演着至关重要的角色，但我们对韧皮部进化的理解还处于初级阶段。目前尚未解决的关键问题包括：(I)韧皮部起源于何时；(Ii)在过去的4亿年中，韧皮部的结构、功能和遗传工具是如何演变的；(Iii)气候变化是如何驱动韧皮部演化的？在这个项目中，我们回答了这些主要问题，并从根本上增加了我们对地质时期韧皮部演化的理解。为了实现这一点，我们正致力于三个具体目标：1.确定陆地植物韧皮部的起源2。揭示了地质年代在韧皮部结构和功能上与气候变化相关的重大演化创新。在未来领导人联谊会的初始阶段，我们在实现这些目标方面取得了实质性进展，并准备做出将改变我们对韧皮部进化的理解的新发现。在研究金的更新阶段，我们将继续努力实现这些目标，并回答有关韧皮部进化的主要问题。我们将大大扩展我们的目标，描述支撑韧皮部多样化的遗传创新，用广泛的方法描述参与韧皮部发育的基因在蕨类植物和石蒜中的表达，并旨在发现植物韧皮部发育的新调控因素。总体而言，该项目的结果将使我们对过去4亿年来韧皮部进化的理解发生重大变化，并展示采取跨学科方法的额外好处，将活植物、化石和遗传网络的研究结合在一起，回答植物进化中的主要问题。

Plants transport sugars around their bodies in the specialised tissue termed the phloem. The phloem is essential for plant life and underpins the growth and survival of all economically important plants, whether crop or forest species. Given how important the phloem is for plant life it might be predicted that we would have a good understanding of its evolution. However, despite the vital role the phloem plays in living species our understanding of phloem evolution is rudimentary. Key questions remain unanswered including: (i) when did the phloem originate, (ii) how has its structure, function and genetic toolkit evolved over the past 400 million years, (iii) how has phloem evolution been driven by climate change?In this project we are answering these major questions and fundamentally increasing our understanding of phloem evolution over geological time. To achieve this we are working on three specific objectives:1. Defining the origin of the phloem in land plants2. Revealing major evolutionary innovations in phloem structure and function in relation to climatic change through geological time.3. Characterising the genetic innovations that underpinned the diversification of the phloemIn the initial stage of the Future Leaders Fellowship we have made substantial progress to achieving these objectives and are poised to make new discoveries that will change our understanding of phloem evolution. In the renewal phase of the Fellowship we will continue on our path to achieve these objectives and answer the overarching questions about phloem evolution. We will greatly expand on our objective to characterise the genetic innovations that underpinned the diversification of the phloem, with a broad scale approach to characterise the expression of genes involved in phloem development in ferns and lycophytes and aim to discover novel regulators of the phloem development in lycophytes.Collectively the outcome of the project will make a step change in our understanding of phloem evolution over the last 400 million year and demonstrate the added benefit of taking an interdisciplinary approach, combining studies of living plants, fossils and genetic networks together to answer major questions in plant evolution.