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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

GLOOMY LIGHT. “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

CARBON SOURCING. “Seagrasses have long been regarded as C3 plants, but physiological measurements have gathered indications that several seagrass species, including Z. marina, are C3-C4 intermediates or have various carbon-concentrating mechanisms to aid the RuBisCO enzyme in carbon acquisition.” http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

SOLUTION TO SUFFOCATION. “The two seagrass species under investigation, Z. marina and P. oceanica, are known to utilize bicarbonate (HCO−3) as a major source of inorganic carbon as a major source of inorganic carbon for photosynthesis.” http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

MARINE PLANT SUFFOCATION. “While CO2 can readily diffuse from the air through the stomata to the mesophyll cells in terrestrial plants, aquatic plants often have limited CO2 diffusion rates. Factors contributing to slow CO2 diffusion in aquatic plants (and especially in seagrasses) are thick boundary layers around the leaves that are sometimes amplified by the presence of unicellular or multicellular photosynthetic epiphytes that compete for CO2 and the low rate of CO2 transport in water.” http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

MARINE PHOTOSYNTHESIS. “Seven PSGs were related to the photosynthetic pathway and may reflect adaptations to new conditions of carbon fixation and photosynthesis that seagrasses had to face after their split from a terrestrial ancestor. Fixation of CO2 is expected to be more difficult for seagrasses since seawater contains very little dissolved carbon dioxide.” (PSG = positively selected genes). http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn