PREreviews of “Evolution of chlorophyll degradation is associated with plant transition to land” | PREreview

Skip to preprint details Skip to PREreviews

Evolution of chlorophyll degradation is associated with plant transition to land

by Isabel Schumacher, Damian Menghini, Serguei Ovinnikov, Mareike Hauenstein, Nick Fankhauser, Cyril Zipfel, Stefan Hörtensteiner, and Sylvain Aubry

Posted: October 8, 2021
Server: bioRxiv
DOI: 10.1101/2021.10.07.463469

Abstract

Colonization of land by green plants (Viridiplantae) some 500 million years ago was made possible by large metabolic and biochemical adaptations. Chlorophyll, the central pigment of photosynthesis, is highly photo-active. In order to mitigate deleterious effects of pigment accumulation, some plants have evolved a coordinated pathway to deal with chlorophyll degradation end-products, so-called phyllobilins. This pathway has been so far mostly unravelled inArabidopsis thaliana. Here, large-scale comparative phylogenomic coupled to an innovative biochemical characterization strategy of phyllobilins allow a better understanding how such a pathway appeared in Viridiplantae. Our analysis reveals a stepwise evolution of the canonical pheophorbideamonooxygenase/phyllobilin pathway. It appears to have evolved gradually, first in chlorophyte’s chloroplasts, to ensure multicellularity by detoxifying chlorophyll catabolites, and in charophytes outside chloroplasts to allow adaptation of embryophytes to land. At least six out of the eight genes involved in the pathway were already present in the last common ancestor of green plants. This strongly suggests parallel evolution of distinct enzymes catalysing similar reactions in various lineages, particularly for the dephytylation step. Together, our study suggests that chlorophyll degradation accompanied the transition from water to land, and was therefore of great importance for plant diversification.

Read the preprint

1 Rapid PREreview

by Alizée Malnoë

Where can I fill out a Rapid PREreview?

We’ve recently replaced Rapid PREreviews with Structured PREreviews.

You can write a Structured PREreview now.

We’ll be updating older Rapid PREreviews like these soon.

Aggregated Rapid PREreviews
Question	Yes	Unsure	N/A	No
Are the findings novel?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Are the results likely to lead to future research?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Is sufficient detail provided to allow reproduction of the study?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Are the methods and statistics appropriate for the analysis?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Are the principal conclusions supported by the data and analysis?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Does the manuscript discuss limitations?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Have the authors adequately discussed ethical concerns?	0%	0%	100%	0%
Does the manuscript include new data?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Are the data used in the manuscript available?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Is the code used in the manuscript available?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Would you recommend this manuscript to others?	100%	0%	0%	0%
Do you recommend this manuscript for peer review?	100%	0%	0%	0%

1 PREreview

Write a PREreview Request a PREreview

PREreview by Alizée Malnoë et al.

Authored by Alizée Malnoë, André T. Graça, Aurélie Crepin, Domenica Farci, Jack Forsman, Jianli Duan, Jingfang Hao, Maria Paola Puggioni, and Pierrick Bru

Schumacher et al. discuss the metabolic pathways evolved by green plants to degrade chlorophyll molecules. The authors combined a large-scale comparative phylogenomic approach with biochemical characterization of putative novel phyllobilins to shed light on how the degradation pathway evolved.…

Read the PREreview by Alizée Malnoë et al.