By Rodielon Putol ,
1 hours ago
Umbrella-like structures rise above the flat green body of a common liverwort, supporting its female reproductive organs. Credit: Shutterstock
Water runs downhill, and that’s a problem for liverworts, small plants whose sperm can reach an egg only by swimming.
In the common liverwort, a flat green species, the female holds her eggs up on a short stalk, away from the damp ground.
A new study found that the outside of that stalk carries water upward, against gravity, to the eggs at the top.
The upward flow helps resolve a conflict between fertilization and spore dispersal.
Height makes fertilization harder. But height also helps the plant spread its spores, and the study traces how the stalk came to handle both jobs.
Bo Xu, a professor at the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences , led the work, and Xiaotong Qi is the study’s first author.
The team studied Marchantia polymorpha , the best-studied liverwort in biology labs.
Height helps spores spread
Liverworts, mosses and hornworts belong to a group called bryophytes. They make no flowers or seeds, and they don’t have true roots.
They also lack the complex network of water-carrying tis...