ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Four hundred million years of silica biomineralization in land plants.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 148 citations in OpenAlex.
- Biosilicification in monocots: Comparative analysis highlights contrasting patterns of deposition.American journal of botany · 2025Article
- Characterization of two proline-rich proteins involved in silicon deposition inFrontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- Fossil evidence for silica biomineralization in Permian lycophytes.National science review · 2024Article
- MicroED: Unveiling the Structural Chemistry of Plant Biomineralisation.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Is there silicon in flowers and what does it tell us?Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Conserved signalling components coordinate epidermal patterning and cuticle deposition in barley.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Size always matters, shape matters only for the big: potential optical effects of silica bodies inJournal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Oldest leaf mine trace fossil from East Asia provides insight into ancient nutritional flow in a plant-herbivore interaction.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Structure and function of a silicic acid channel Lsi1.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Review
- Variation of foliar silicon concentrations in temperate forbs: effects of soil silicon, phylogeny and habitat.Oecologia · 2021Article
- Silicon in the Soil-Plant Continuum: Intricate Feedback Mechanisms within Ecosystems.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Lsi2: A black box in plant silicon transport.Plant and soil · 2021Review
- Silicon-Mediated Enhancement of Herbivore Resistance in Agricultural Crops.Frontiers in plant science · 2021Article
- Unique lignin modifications pattern the nucleation of silica in sorghum endodermis.Journal of experimental botany · 2020Article
- In-silico Exploration of Channel Type and Efflux Silicon Transporters and Silicification Proteins in 80 Sequenced Viridiplantae Genomes.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Soil nutrients and precipitation are major drivers of global patterns of grass leaf silicification.Ecology · 2020Article
- Silicon and Plant-Animal Interactions: Towards an Evolutionary Framework.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Phytolith Formation in Plants: From Soil to Cell.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Review
- Effect of phosphate and silicate on selenite uptake and phloem-mediated transport in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.).Environmental science and pollution research international · 2019Article
- A Review on Si Uptake and Transport System.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biomineralization plays a fundamental role in the global silicon cycle. Grasses are known to mobilize significant quantities of Si in the form of silica biominerals and dominate the terrestrial realm today, but they have relatively recent origins and only rose to taxonomic and ecological prominence within the Cenozoic Era. This raises questions regarding when and how the biological silica cycle evolved. To address these questions, we examined silica abundances of extant members of early-diverging land plant clades, which show that silica biomineralization is widespread across terrestrial plant linages. Particularly high silica abundances are observed in lycophytes and early-diverging ferns. However, silica biomineralization is rare within later-evolving gymnosperms, implying a complex evolutionary history within the seed plants. Electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy show that the most common silica-mineralized tissues include the vascular system, epidermal cells, and stomata, which is consistent with the hypothesis that biomineralization in plants is frequently coupled to transpiration. Furthermore, sequence, phylogenetic, and structural analysis of nodulin 26-like intrinsic proteins from diverse plant genomes points to a plastic and ancient capacity for silica accumulation within terrestrial plants. The integration of these two comparative biology approaches demonstrates that silica biomineralization has been an important process for land plants over the course of their >400 My evolutionary history.
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