Friday Fellow: Spreading Earthmoss

by Piter Kehoma Boll

If you still think mosses are uninteresting lifeforms, perhaps you will change your mind after knowing the spreading earthmoss, Physcomitrella patens.

Found in temperate regions of the world, except for South America, but more commonly recorded in North America and Eurasia, the spreading earthmoss grows near water bodies, being one of the first species to colonize the exposed soil around pools of water. Although widely distributed, it is not a common species.

The spreading earthmoss growing on mud. Photo by Hermann Schachner.

Since the beginning of the 1970s, the spreading earthmoss has been used as a model organism, especially regarding gene manipulation. Differently from what occurs in vascular plants, the dominant life phase in mosses is the gametophyte, an haploid organism, meaning it has only one copy of each chromosome in its cells. This is an ideal condition for the study of gene expression, as the activation or inactivation of a gene is not hindered by a second one in another copy of the chromosome in the same cell.

Physcomitrella patens growing in the lab. Credits to the Lab of Ralf Reski.*

By controlling gene expression in the spreading earthmoss, researches can track the role of each one of them in the plant’s development. Comparing these data with that known from flowering plants, we can have a better understanding of how the plant kingdom evolved.

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References:

Cove, D. (2005). The Moss Physcomitrella patens Annual Review of Genetics, 39 (1), 339-358 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.genet.39.073003.110214

Schaefer, D. (2001). The Moss Physcomitrella patens, Now and Then PLANT PHYSIOLOGY, 127 (4), 1430-1438 DOI: 10.1104/pp.127.4.1430

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