LSU professor to speak at AAAS conference on evolution of green plants
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 16, 2001
BATON ROUGE -- Louisiana State University researcher Russ Chapman is one of five scientists who will present a symposium on the origins and evolution of plant life on earth Feb. 16 from 2:30-5:30 p.m. Pacific time at the national conference for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The conference will be held Feb. 16-20 in San Francisco.
The researchers will discuss their recently completed project known as Deep Green, which retraced the evolutionary process of earth's green plants to construct the most complete "tree of life" for any group of living things on the planet.
Through Deep Green, the scientists found that primitive freshwater plants provided the ancestral stock from which all of the earth's green land plants are descended. This finding overturned the belief that the "land-plant invasion," that is, the movement of plants from water onto land, was led by seawater plants. This discovery could have profound ecological, medical and economic implications.
Chapman, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and executive director of LSU's Center for Coastal, Energy and Environmental Resources, is one of three scientists who founded the Deep Green project in 1994. The founding researchers invited their colleagues from around the world to participate in the project, and during the past six years, more than 200 scientists from across the globe have joined the effort.
The researchers have found that it was green algae -- the most primitive of freshwater plants - - that became terrestrial and gave rise to land plants. However, while many groups of green algae managed to conquer the land, only one specific group evolved into land plants. The scientists are still trying to figure out why.
Uncovering the history of land plants is important because their evolution is the key to understanding the origins of all life on earth, scientists say.
"The evolution of the land plants was crucial to the development of plant and animal life as we know it," Chapman said. "There would not be any advanced animal life on the planet -- including human beings -- without land plants. And there would be no land plants without green algae."
During the AAAS symposium, titled "Deep Green: Phylogeny, Evolution, and Genomics of Green Plants," the five participating researchers will each speak on a different aspect of Deep Green. Brent Mishler of the University of California, Berkeley, will give an overview of plant phylogeny; Chapman will speak on the green algal conquest of the land; Melvin Oliver of Texas Tech University will focus on the evolution of plant tolerance to desiccation, or drying out; Claude dePamphilis of Penn State University will address the Floral Genome Project, an offshoot of Deep Green that will look at the genetic perspectives on plant reproduction; and Michael Sanderson of the University of California, Davis, will speak on macro evolution of green plants.
The Deep Green project was such a success that it has spawned a number of related studies, which have recently been funded by the National Science Foundation. The new studies will take the Deep Green findings further, looking at more specific aspects of the ancestry of green land plants. Several researchers have received funding for these new projects, including LSU professor Meredith Blackwell, who recently received a $500,000 NSF grant to lead a coordinated research group focusing on mycology, or the study of fungi. Other new projects include Deep Gene, which will examine the genetics of freshwater plants to identify which genes enabled them to move to land; and Deep Time, which will study the development of flowers in some land plants.
"Some people were initially skeptical about this idea of a group research project, but Deep Green has been so successful that it is now serving as a model for a new NSF program," Chapman said. "It is proof that we should support projects where investigators are sharing a common interest in major scientific questions and cooperating as a group."
Researchers involved in the Deep Green project include those who were part of the Green-Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group, which was initially funded in the U.S. by the NSF, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
For more information on Deep Green, check the project's Web site at http://ucjeps.herb.berkeley.edu/bryolab/greenplantpage.html or contact Chapman at LSU at 225-LSU-3457 or [email protected]. From Feb. 16-20, he can be reached at the AAAS conference at 415-771-1400.
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Contact Kristine Calongne LSU News Service 225-578-5985 [email protected]
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More news and information available on LSU's homepage at www.lsu.edu.
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