How Plants Evolved and What This Means For Our Food Supply
An EU-funded project investigating how oxygen in the air millions of years ago might have affected the evolution of plants is making important discoveries that could inform our approach to climate change, space exploration and ensuring future food supplies. Today, scientists in areas as varied as food security, climate change and space exploration need to know more about plants – how they live and grow and what effect environmental conditions can have on them. A key part of understanding plants is knowing how they evolved. The EU-funded OXYEVOL project is investigating how variations in atmospheric oxygen levels over millions of years might have affected the appearance of new plant species. “We are exploring the relationship between oxygen concentration and plant evolution,” says University College Dublin’s Prof. Jennifer McElwain, who received a European Research Council Starting Grant to undertake the project. OXYEVOL’s researchers are looking closely at the plant fossil record and comparing it to the known history of atmospheric oxygen content. Meanwhile, they are also undertaking a series of highly novel ‘mini-world’ experiments, in which living plant species with diverse evolutionary histories are being exposed to different atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations in a growth chamber. The most significant result so far is the observation that greater numbers of plant species seem to have originated when atmospheric oxygen concentrations were highest. We already know that the appearance of complex organisms over a billion years ago was linked to a rise in atmospheric oxygen levels. OXYEVOL’s results suggest that oxygen has also been an important evolutionary…
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