植物进化发育生物学的形成与研究进展

植物进化发育生物学是最近十几年来才兴起的一门学科,它是进化发育生物学的主要分支之一。进化发育生物学的产生经历了进化生物学与胚胎学、遗传学和发育生物学的三次大的综合,其历史可追溯到19世纪初冯.贝尔所创立的比较胚胎学。相关研究曾沉寂了近一个世纪,直到20世纪80年代早期,动物中homeobox基因被发现,90年代初花发育的ABC模型被提出,加之对发育相关基因研究的不断深入,才使基因型与表型联系了起来,进而促进了进化发育生物学的飞速发展。目前进化发育生物学已成为21世纪生命科学领域的研究热点之一。本文详细阐述了进化发育生物学产生和发展的历程,综述了最近十几年来植物进化发育生物学的主要研究进展。文中重点介绍了与植物发育密切相关的MADS-box基因在植物各大类群中的研究现状,讨论了植物进化发育生物学领域的研究成果对花被演化、花对称性以及叶的进化等重要问题的启示。

Foundation and Current Progress of Plant Evolutionary Developmental Biology

The discipline plant evolutionary developmental biology has emerged over the last 10 years. It is a major clade of evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo. Evo-devo has been established step by step, with integration of evolutionary biology and embryology, genetics and developmental biology. The discipline has its origin in comparative embryology founded by von Baer in the early nineteenth century. Following a quiescent period of almost one century, evo-devo erupted out of the discovery of the homeobox genes in the early 1980s and the proposal of the floral ABC model in the early 1990s, in addition to the flourishing research on developmental genes. Evo-devo has become one of the hot topics in life sciences in the twenty-first century. In this article, we review the history of evo-devo, and then focus on the progress of plant evolutionary developmental biology in the last 10 years. We mainly introduce studies on the MADS-box genes that play a key role in revealing plant development in the major clades of plants. Moreover, we discuss the implications of such important evolutionary issues as perianth origin, flower symmetry, and leaf evolution.