Evolutionary Biology of Plants

The course will provide the student with knowledge and skills on the following topics:
- the groups and phylogenetic classification
- Conquest of the land by plants: Emergence from the aquatic environment and evolution of body plans
- Endosymbiosis in the plant kingdom: Mechanism, coordination of three genomes and consequences on physiology, development and metabolism
- Photosynthesis evolution (antenna structure, photoprotection, state transitions)
- Secondary metabolisms in the plant Kingdom
- Microalgaes evolution and extreme conditions
- Evolution of reproductive strategies: algae, mosses, ferns, spermaphytes
- The origin of the flower
Students will learn how to retrieve scientific articles about a specific topic, prepare a report about their fndings and present it to the class.

- Being able to describe the main characteristics of the green lineage, to explain the issues of the land conquest by plants and to compare reproductive strategies among major plants groups
- Searching for scientific bibliographic references related to a defined topic and finding the corresponding articles
- Searching, in a set of reviews and primary articles, for key/pertinent elements that inform on advances in a given scientific topic
- Putting a scientific question in the context of the state-of-the-art; Presenting (orally and in a written report) a synthetic view on a large amount of scientific data
- Understanding how scientific approaches and methodologies lead to knowledge elaboration
- Working in collaborative groups