Polyploid genome evolution across land plants: Progress and perspectives

The enormous wealth of data on the incidence of polyploidy and its significance for genome evolution in angiosperms has greatly advanced our understanding of plant evolution. This has enabled the identification of correlations between polyploidization and life history trait evolution as well as unraveling the complex interplay between genome multiplication and the biology of individual lineages giving rise to intricate and unique patterns of genome evolution despite shared evolutionary processes. Advances in sequencing and analytical methods result in the quickly increasing representation of other land plant lineages, such as bryophytes or ferns. These data continue to reveal that the levels of genome evolution complexity known from angiosperms are to be found across all land plants, albeit to lineage-specific extents. Greatly expanded taxonomic sampling across land plants will not only deepen our understanding of the interplay between polyploidy and the evolution of traits and life histories, e.g. in the context of the conquest of land, but also will allow an evolutionarily broader assessment of the role of polyploidy in shaping genome dynamics.