Pryer K M, Schneider H, Smith A R, Cranfill R, Wolf P G, Hunt J S, Sipes S D
Department of Botany, The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois 60605, USA.
Nature. 2001 Feb 1;409(6820):618-22. doi: 10.1038/35054555.
Most of the 470-million-year history of plants on land belongs to bryophytes, pteridophytes and gymnosperms, which eventually yielded to the ecological dominance by angiosperms 90 Myr ago. Our knowledge of angiosperm phylogeny, particularly the branching order of the earliest lineages, has recently been increased by the concurrence of multigene sequence analyses. However, reconstructing relationships for all the main lineages of vascular plants that diverged since the Devonian period has remained a challenge. Here we report phylogenetic analyses of combined data--from morphology and from four genes--for 35 representatives from all the main lineages of land plants. We show that there are three monophyletic groups of extant vascular plants: (1) lycophytes, (2) seed plants and (3) a clade including equisetophytes (horsetails), psilotophytes (whisk ferns) and all eusporangiate and leptosporangiate ferns. Our maximum-likelihood analysis shows unambiguously that horsetails and ferns together are the closest relatives to seed plants. This refutes the prevailing view that horsetails and ferns are transitional evolutionary grades between bryophytes and seed plants, and has important implications for our understanding of the development and evolution of plants.
陆地上植物4.7亿年历史的大部分属于苔藓植物、蕨类植物和裸子植物，它们最终在9000万年前被被子植物的生态优势所取代。最近，多基因序列分析的同时出现增加了我们对被子植物系统发育的了解，特别是最早谱系的分支顺序。然而，重建自泥盆纪以来分化的所有维管植物主要谱系之间的关系仍然是一个挑战。在这里，我们报告了对来自陆地植物所有主要谱系的35个代表的形态学和四个基因的组合数据的系统发育分析。我们表明，现存维管植物有三个单系类群：（1）石松类植物，（2）种子植物，（3）一个包括木贼类植物（马尾）、松叶蕨类植物（松叶蕨）以及所有厚囊蕨类和薄囊蕨类蕨类植物的分支。我们的最大似然分析明确表明，木贼类植物和蕨类植物一起是种子植物最亲近的亲属。这反驳了普遍观点，即木贼类植物和蕨类植物是苔藓植物和种子植物之间的过渡进化阶段，并且对我们理解植物的发育和进化具有重要意义。
