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An Evolutionary Perspective on the Plant Hormone Ethylene

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Ethylene in Plants

Abstract

The plant hormone ethylene plays diverse roles in growth, development, and stress responses, and has been well studied in Arabidopsis and other flowering plants, with somewhat sparser information among other land plants. There has been increasing interest in the evolution of this hormone, as studies of mosses, lycopods, ferns, and gymnosperms have made it clear that ethylene functions as a plant hormone across the land plants (embryophytes). Hormones present a particularly interesting problem in evolutionary biology because they require cooperating components for biosynthesis, perception, signaling, and response, and the sequence by which these different parts of the hormone system become operational is not always immediately obvious. In the case of ethylene, biosynthesis appears to have an ancient origin in the Archaeplastida, whereas ethylene signaling was assembled from a combination of prokaryotic, eukaryotic, and plant-specific elements. The gene for ethylene perception appears to have originated in cyanobacteria and entered the plant lineage with the endosymbiotic acquisition of the chloroplast, possibly originally functioning for environmental sensing. Most likely, ethylene as a plant hormone arose during the evolution of the charophyte algae, which ultimately gave rise to land plants. Ethylene’s roles as a hormone have undergone considerable modification during the course of plant evolution, and yet elements of the pathways involved are surprisingly well conserved. Study of the genomes and biology of diverse plants and plant relatives is helping to reveal this history. Knowledge of the process by which it has evolved helps clarify the relationships among different aspects of ethylene signaling, suggests mechanisms that could be of theoretical and practical importance, and reveals ways in which natural systems have solved problems that may be of agricultural interest.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by NSF grant MCB-0923796 to CC, NSF grants EF0523719 (Microbial Genome Sequencing) and DEB-1036506 (Assembling the Tree of Life) to CFD, a Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship and a CBMG/CMNS Merit Postdoctoral Fellowship (University of Maryland) to BVDP. CC and CFD are supported in part by the Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station.

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  1. Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Bram Van de Poel, Endymion D. Cooper, Charles F. Delwiche & Caren Chang

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  1. Bram Van de Poel
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  2. Endymion D. Cooper
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  3. Charles F. Delwiche
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  4. Caren Chang
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Correspondence to Caren Chang .

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  1. Inst. of Plant Physiology and Ecology, National Key Laboratory of Plant Molecular Genetics, Shanghai Inst. for Biological Sciences Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

    Chi-Kuang Wen

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Van de Poel, B., Cooper, E.D., Delwiche, C.F., Chang, C. (2015). An Evolutionary Perspective on the Plant Hormone Ethylene. In: Wen, CK. (eds) Ethylene in Plants. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9484-8_7

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