Back in Panamá, I started working on hornworts during my bachelor’s degree and, frankly, there were just 5-6 people interested in the world. In 2003, I had the opportunity to do my master’s with the hornwort expert, Karen Renzaglia at Southern Illinois University. During my doctoral degree at UCONN, with Bernard Goffinet, I explored phylogenetics and population genetics of one species with separate sexes and potentially lacking any kind of sexual reproduction. In 2012, during my postdoc with Susanne Renner, I did one study on the evolution of the pyrenoid. At that point hornworts were the poor cousins of mosses and liverworts.
Things have changed dramatically! Thanks to a young and quite clever (then -2012-phd student, now a professor at Cornell University) scientist, Fay-Wei Li, hornworts have been at the center of the conversation about land plant evolution and improvement of crop efficiency.
Fay-Wei leads a team of very talented students and postdocs, among them, Tanner Robison, and Peter Schafran. This month, in the first issue of Nature Plants, we have published two important papers (game changers) on hornwort biology. The first one reports ten hornwort genomes and explores sex and accessory chromosomes. The second explores the genomics of the hornwort pyrenoid and set the basis of implementing this carbon concentrating mechanism in crops. Of course, more research news are coming.
Lastly, I went to visit the renowned symbiotic expert Kathrin Rousk in Copenhagen and I gave a talk about the research in my lab. Inspired by this editorial, we said to ourselves: what about bryophytes! In less than 2 hours we brainstormed a short note for Nature Plants and Kathrin (brilliantly!) suggested the title: Time to end the vascular plant chauvinism. This short note brings a lot of attention to bryophytes, but I personally suggest to read this article (I just saw it 2 hours after submitting!). This paper carefully explains the importance of bryophytes and why we need more, not only attention but, FUNDING!
JCVA – 25/01/2025
Some news about the papers here:
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/03/sequencing-hornwort-genomes-could-improve-crops
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-tiny-reveal-big-potential-boosting.html
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1069566
Hornwort Genomes Provide Clues On How Plants Moved From Water To Land On Earth