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  1. Abstract Background and aims

    Hakea prostrata(Proteaceae) is a highly phosphorus-use-efficient plant native to southwest Australia. It maintains a high photosynthetic rate at low leaf phosphorus (P) and exhibits delayed leaf greening, a convergent adaptation that increases nutrient-use efficiency. This study aimed to provide broad physiological and gene expression profiles across leaf development, uncovering pathways leading from young leaves as nutrient sinks to mature leaves as low-nutrient, energy-transducing sources.

    Methods

    To explore gene expression underlying delayed greening, we analysed a de novo transcriptome forH. prostrataacross five stages of leaf development. Photosynthesis and respiration rates, and foliar pigment, P and nitrogen (N) concentrations were determined, including the division of P into five biochemical fractions.

    Key results

    Transcripts encoding functions associated with leaf structure generally decreased in abundance across leaf development, concomitant with decreases in foliar concentrations of 85% for anthocyanins, 90% for P and 70% for N. The expression of genes associated with photosynthetic function increased during or after leaf expansion, in parallel with increases in photosynthetic pigments and activity, much later in leaf development than in species that do not have delayed greening. As leaves developed, transcript abundance for cytosolic and mitochondrial ribosomal proteins generally declined, whilst transcripts for chloroplast ribosomal proteins increased.

    Conclusions

    There was a much longer temporal separation of leaf cell growth from chloroplast development inH. prostratathan is found in species that lack delayed greening. Transcriptome-guided analysis of leaf development inH. prostrataprovided insight into delayed greening as a nutrient-saving strategy in severely phosphorus-impoverished landscapes.

     
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  2. Green plants (Viridiplantae) include around 450,000–500,000 species of great diversity and have important roles in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Here, as part of the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative, we sequenced the vegetative transcriptomes of 1,124 species that span the diversity of plants in a broad sense (Archaeplastida), including green plants (Viridiplantae), glaucophytes (Glaucophyta) and red algae (Rhodophyta). Our analysis provides a robust phylogenomic framework for examining the evolution of green plants. Most inferred species relationships are well supported across multiple species tree and supermatrix analyses, but discordance among plastid and nuclear gene trees at a few important nodes highlights the complexity of plant genome evolution, including polyploidy, periods of rapid speciation, and extinction. Incomplete sorting of ancestral variation, polyploidization and massive expansions of gene families punctuate the evolutionary history of green plants. Notably, we find that large expansions of gene families preceded the origins of green plants, land plants and vascular plants, whereas whole-genome duplications are inferred to have occurred repeatedly throughout the evolution of flowering plants and ferns. The increasing availability of high-quality plant genome sequences and advances in functional genomics are enabling research on genome evolution across the green tree of life. 
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