Over the past decade the liverwort Marchantia polymorpha has become a model for studying various aspects of land plant evolution and fundamental plant biological questions. However, unlike many angiosperm genetic models, few genomic resources exist for related liverwort species from which comparisons would help refine the genome annotation of M. polymorpha.
Marchantia foliacea is a southern hemisphere species and can be found along streams or in swampy areas in the south-east portion of mainland Australia, in Tasmania, in New Zealand and in scattered areas of south-west Chile. M. foliacea is morphologically similar to M. polymorpha in most aspects of its life cycle, including the vegetative thallus and the asexual propagules, the gemma. The primary distinguishing characters are the shapes of the male (antheridiophores) and female (archegoniophores) reproductive strictures.
Despite the similarity, M. foliacea diverged from M. polymorpha in the early Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago. This early divergence and morphological and anatomical similarity make M. foliacea an ideal model for the study of genome evolution and identification of conserved non-coding sequences. Our lab has sequenced, assembled, and annotated the genome of this species and we have begun to compare its genome with that of M. polymorpha.