Advances in Research with Bryophytes

Dear Colleagues,

(Bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) are the closest living relatives to the earliest land plants. During their evolution from water to land they have adapted and developed mechanisms to sustain the dry and harsh conditions on land. As a result, bryophytes can be found in almost every land ecosystem, occuring in cold and wet arctic environments and even in hot and dry deserts. Since thousands of years, bryophytes have been used by humans as part of ethno-medicinal remedies in traditional medicine, as padding material to stabilise wooden joints in clay buildings, or as filtering material to clean polluted water in latrines and fountains. These traditional uses have inspired research to explore their potential for use in biotechnology and bioengineering from various perspectives. Bryophytes are nowadays considered in a wide range of applications ranging from using biologically active products in medicine, agroecology and biology, as pharmaceutic flavouring agents, as part of bioreactors, biofuels, in understanding ecosystem responses to climate change, in rewilding ecosystems, in paludicultures, as bioindicators, in the filtering of pollutants, or in gardening and floristics.

To this end, a large diversity of biologically active compounds and specialized genes have been discovered in bryophytes that are absent from vascular plants. In the last decades, bryophytes such as Physcomitriella/Physcomitrium patens and Marchantia spp. have become model species in the production of biotechnologically relevant compounds that show antimicrobial, antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral and even anticancer effects. The rapidly increasing level of information on genetics has enabled functional and comparative genomic approaches and the construction of metabolic pathways promoting molecular biotechnological approaches.

On the other hand, contemporary trends dictate the high relevance on diversity research and crossing the information between biotechnology and more fundamental knowledge, bidirectionally. At present, many conservation efforts demand biotechnological approach and accelerating the biotechnological goals are supported by basic knowledge of ecology and diversity of bryophytes. Thus, the bryophyte science become wider and at the same time multi-layered.

• biotechnology
• bioengineering
• bryology
• bryophytes
• bioeconomy
• molecular biology
• biochemistry
• Eco-physiology
• Conservation