The deepest divergences in land plants inferred from phylogenomic evidence

Phylogenetic relationships among the four major lineages of land plants (liverworts, mosses, hornworts, and vascular plants) remain vigorously contested; their resolution is essential to our understanding of the origin and early evolution of land plants. We analyzed three different complementary data sets: a multigene supermatrix, a genomic structural character matrix, and a chloroplast genome sequence matrix, using maximum likelihood, maximum parsimony, and compatibility methods. Analyses of all three data sets strongly supported liverworts as the sister to all other land plants, and analyses of the multigene and chloroplast genome matrices provided moderate to strong support for hornworts as the sister to…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: 0093012, 0531689, CAREER, 0332298, 0622764
• NN
  National Natural Science Foundation of China

  Award: 30228004