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INCREASED LEVELS. "One of the questions that has to remain open is how exactly do seagrasses deal with the high salinity of the ocean. Seagrasses have been found to harbor increased intracellular levels of Na+ and K+ as compared to terrestrial angiosperm species as well as to other aquatic angiosperms." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

SALT TOLERANCE. "Physiologically, however, seagrasses must cope with high ion concentrations, inefficient carbon uptake and other physical coping mechanisms that are still poorly understood." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

FRESH VS SALT WATER. "A number of terrestrial lineages of plants have evolved into aquatic-freshwater hydrophytes and a number of morphological features are shared by both hydrophytes and seagrasses, e.g., the presence of a diffusive boundary layer around the leaves, a photosynthetic epidermis, loss of stomata and the development of aerenchyma." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

DATA LIMITATIONS. "The available dataset allowed only for the investigation of 189 orthologous clusters, equivalent to ~1% of the A. thaliana genome. Since orthologous clusters include only ESTs from both seagrasses, the presented dataset is not an unbiased sample of the genome and is probably enriched for genes that show significant expression levels in both seagrass species." (ESTs = expressed sequence tags). http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

GENETIC DIVERGENCE. “Only genes that were contained in the available seagrass EST collections could be analyzed in this study. Consequently, the current dataset of orthologous gene clusters for 10 angiosperm species is biased and limited in size. 51 genes showed evidence for positive selection in seagrass branches indicating that photosynthesis, a few metabolic pathways, and ribosomes have strongly diverged after the split of the common ancestor of seagrasses from terrestrial monocots.” http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

LIGHT ADAPTATIONS. “Finally, seagrasses are able to activate different mechanisms to cope with conditions of light-limitation and shifted light spectrum through long-lasting metabolic adjustments including down-regulation of RuBisCO, enhanced proteolysis and putative changes in the antenna complex.” http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn