Many thanks to all the people that provided support to this work: @jacquet-chris.bsky.social, @baptistebio.bsky.social, C. Dunand S. Cheng, H. San Clemente, H. Philippe, S. Aziz ! (18/18)

Lisez le communiqué de presse de @universitetoulouse.bsky.social , @utoulouse.bsky.social
impliquant mes collègues @chloe-beaulieu.bsky.social et @pierremarcdelaux.bsky.social, du laboratoire @lrsv-toulouse.bsky.social , et bien d'autres !
⬇️

www.univ-tlse3.fr/actualite-de...

And if you want to learn more about the genetic bases of stress response in Marchantia and how it puts into perspective what we know about land plants, you can check out our latest preprint on the genetic bases of the response of M. polymorpha to a fungal pathogen doi.org/10.1101/2024... (17/18)

If you want to get into the Marchantia adventure, free to explore this dataset on Marpolbase (marchantia.info/pangenome/) (16/18)

This great team effort from the Marchantia community opens new research avenues for better understanding the genetic basis of adaptation in Marchantia, but also provides fresh insights into land plant evolution! (15/18)

This gene family, probably involved in the drought response of M. polymorpha, originates from a horizontal gene transfer from a fungi to the ancestor of land plant, later lost in seed plants. Studying Marchantia therefore enabled us to further understand how plants conquered the land! (14/18)

But one of the functions enriched in the accessory genome was a fungal fruit body lectin, that does not exist in angiosperms! A FUNGAL fruit body lectin.. that was not expected! (13/18)

Focusing on the M. polymorpha ssp. ruderalis pangenome, we took a look at the accessory genes, displaying presence absence variation between the accessions. A functional enrichment reveals that it is linked to response to stress, similarly to what has been observed in angiosperms (12/18)

Finally, we constructed a pangenome to visualise the presence absence of genes in the different accessions. We found genetic features shared by all accessions in the 3 Marchantia subspecies and the sister species, Marchantia paleacea, a glimpse into the “basic Marchantia toolkit” (11/18)

Performing a Genome x Environment Analysis, we identified loci correlated with climatic variables in Marchantia polymorpha, among which a loci encoding for an ABC1 atypical kinase, that could be involved in abscisic acid-related stress response. And peroxidases (again). And a NLR. (10/18)

And we found significantly more gene families bearing the same selection signatures than expected by chance. This means that some gene families (terpenes synthases, peroxidases…) are repeatedly recruited for adaptation across the range of land plants! (9/18)

Selection signatures on Marchantia’s genes were then compared to their orthologs from Arabidopsis thaliana and Medicago truncatula (Help from @kellerjeanphd.bsky.social) (8/18)

Then we identified genes under selective pressure in M. polymorpha, and noticed that Marchantia’s polymorphic genes are likely to mediate the interactions between the plant and its environment (e.g. pathogenesis related proteins, lectins or peroxidases) (7/18)

First, we took a look at the population structure of M. polymorpha. There is no genetic x geographic correlation, suggesting gene flow and recombination across the large geographical range of M. polymorpha ssp. ruderalis (6/18)

Short read mapping on the reference genome allowed to uncover 12 million SNPs in the 3 ssp (5.3 millions in ssp. ruderalis alone)
We now had a great resource to study the genetic diversity in this bryophyte! (available on Marpolbase marchantia.info/pangenome/, thanks to Y. Tanizawa) (5/18)

All accessions were sequenced in short reads (D. Mbadinga, @karimaelm.bsky.social, C. Girou, I. Diop) + 2 sequenced in long reads (@inrae-cnrgv.bsky.social & and A. Braeutigam H. Wiebke, S. Zachgo, A. Meierhenrich, B. Laker), producing new assembled genomes for Marchantia polymorpha (4/18)

But also from Northern America (J. Nelson) and from Japan, distributed between the three subspecies of Marchantia polymorpha (16 from ssp. montivagans, 14 from ssp. polymorpha and 103 from ssp. ruderalis) (3/18)

After years of collaborative sampling, we brought together a collection of 133 accessions from
Europe (@pierremarcdelaux.bsky.social, P. Szovenyi, F. Roux & the Great British Liverwort Hunt (led by @davidjhoey.bsky.social , @ilichenmoss2.bsky.social , E. Moyroud and @dromius.bsky.social) (2/18)