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

植物通过称为韧皮部的特殊组织在体内运输糖。韧皮部对植物生命至关重要，支撑着所有经济上重要的植物的生长和生存，无论是作物还是森林物种。考虑到韧皮部对植物生命的重要性，我们可能会对它的进化有一个很好的理解。然而，尽管韧皮部在现存物种中起着至关重要的作用，但我们对韧皮部进化的理解还很初级。关键问题仍未得到解答，包括：(1)韧皮部是何时形成的；(2)在过去4亿年里，韧皮部的结构、功能和遗传工具是如何进化的；(3)气候变化是如何推动韧皮部进化的？在这个项目中，我们正在回答这些主要问题，并从根本上增加我们对韧皮部随地质时间演变的理解。为实现这一目标，我们正在努力实现三个具体目标：确定陆地植物韧皮部的起源。揭示地质时期韧皮部结构和功能与气候变化的重大进化创新。在未来领袖奖学金的初始阶段，我们在实现这些目标方面取得了实质性进展，并准备做出新的发现，这将改变我们对韧皮部进化的理解。在团契的更新阶段，我们将继续我们的道路，以实现这些目标，并回答有关韧皮部进化的首要问题。我们将极大地扩展我们的目标，以表征支撑韧皮部多样化的遗传创新，采用广泛的方法来表征蕨类植物和石松植物韧皮部发育相关基因的表达，并旨在发现石松植物韧皮部发育的新调控因子。总的来说，该项目的结果将使我们对过去4亿年韧皮部进化的理解发生重大变化，并展示采用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起来，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.