ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2006
Nature's green revolution: the remarkable evolutionary rise of C4 plants.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 55 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
55 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evolutionary and environmental drivers of dry-season deciduousness in a legume genus.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Synthetic Biology of Plants and Microbes for Agriculture, Environment, and Future Applications.Chemical reviews · 2026Review
- Unraveling the variation, phylogeny, and taxonomy of Lactuca spp. for germplasm management and breeding.Planta · 2025Review
- Spermatophyta Molecular Clock: Time Drift and Recent Acceleration.Plant-environment interactions (Hoboken, N.J.) · 2025Article
- Prairie management practices influence biodiversity, productivity and surface-atmosphere feedbacks.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- Endogenous Glucose Production in Patients With Glycogen Storage Disease Type Ia Estimated by Oral D-[6,6-2H2]-glucose.The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism · 2024Article
- Mitochondrial DNA analyses revealed distinct lineages in an alpine mammal, Siberian ibex (Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Metabolic Background, Not Photosynthetic Physiology, Determines Drought and Drought Recovery Responses in C3 and C2 Moricandias.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Plastid phylogenomics and morphological character evolution of Chloridoideae (Poaceae).Frontiers in plant science · 2022Article
- Integrating stomatal physiology and morphology: evolution of stomatal control and development of future crops.Oecologia · 2021Article
- The limiting factors and regulatory processes that control the environmental responses of COecologia · 2021Review
- The Legacy of Recurrent Introgression during the Radiation of Hares.Systematic biology · 2021Article
- Kinetic Modifications of CFrontiers in plant science · 2020Article
- Natural variation in stress response induced by low COOpen life sciences · 2020Article
- A Review of CFrontiers in plant science · 2020Article
- Estimating CPhotosynthesis research · 2019Article
- The contribution of fire to the late Miocene spread of grasslands in eastern Eurasia (Black Sea region).Scientific reports · 2019Article
- A diet rich in CMolecular ecology · 2019Article
- Grassland fire ecology has roots in the late Miocene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Fire spread and the issue of community-level selection in the evolution of flammability.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Plants with the C4 photosynthetic 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 CO2 concentrations. 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 CO2 triggered 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 C4 success in North America. CO2-starvation is implicated in the origins of C4 plants 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 C4 mechanism at this time, although possible ancestral components of the C4 pathway 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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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.