Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C<sub>4</sub>plants

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences - Tập 361 Số 1465 - Trang 173-194 - 2006
Colin P. Osborne1, David J. Beerling1
1Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of SheffieldSheffield S10 2TN, UK

Tóm tắt

Plants with the C4photosynthetic pathway dominate today's tropical savannahs and grasslands, and account for some 30% of global terrestrial carbon fixation. Their success stems from a physiological CO2-concentrating pump, which leads to high photosynthetic efficiency in warm climates and low atmospheric CO2concentrations. Remarkably, their dominance of tropical environments was achieved in only the past 10 million years (Myr), less than 3% of the time that terrestrial plants have existed on Earth. We critically review the proposal that declining atmospheric CO2triggered this tropical revolution via its effects on the photosynthetic efficiency of leaves. Our synthesis of the latest geological evidence from South Asia and North America suggests that this emphasis is misplaced. Instead, we find important roles for regional climate change and fire in South Asia, but no obvious environmental trigger for C4success in North America. CO2-starvation is implicated in the origins of C4plants 25–32 Myr ago, raising the possibility that the pathway evolved under more extreme atmospheric conditions experienced 10 times earlier. However, our geochemical analyses provide no evidence of the C4mechanism at this time, although possible ancestral components of the C4pathway are identified in ancient plant lineages. We suggest that future research must redress the substantial imbalance between experimental investigations and analyses of the geological record.

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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Tập 361 Số 1465

173-194

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