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INCREASED SALINITY 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

MOLECULAR ADAPTATION. "These adaptations are possibly associated to the above mentioned Na+ toxicity which seagrasses have likely experienced during their evolution towards the marine environment. To this respect, molecular adaptation of key cellular processes known to be sensitive towards increased ionic levels such as photosynthesis, translation, and selected metabolic enzymes are expected." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-8 View in LinkedIn

KEY GENES. "Positive selection for 51 genes was detected after the split from terrestrial monocots based on a maximum likelihood approach. In the present analysis, many of the identified PSGs are involved in the central biological pathways of translation, photosynthesis, and glycolysis." (PSGs= positively selected genes). 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