Biology, Systematics, and Evolution of Ferns and Lycophytes in the Omics Era

Ferns and lycophytes are distinct lineages, with lycophytes being the oldest lineage among extant vascular plants, and ferns the sister group to seed plants. Historically, both lineages have been studied together and treated as the paraphyletic group pteridophytes, mainly because both lineages are spore-bearing and share many other biological features, such as the overall life cycle. Therefore, despite their lower extant species diversity compared to flowering plants, biology of ferns and lycophytes are extremely important to understand the origins, evolution and diversification of land plants.

For about three decades, insights from molecular data have contributed to revolutionize our understanding of fern and lycophyte evolution. Notwithstanding the high-throughput sequencing data available now, publications involving studies on the omics-scale targeting fern and lycophytes are still incipient. Access to all kinds of omics data (e.g. genomic, metagenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic) provided a renewed perspective for inferring evolutionary processes and patterns in all groups of organisms.

This research topic aims to gather articles based on omics approaches (including museomics) to reveal evolutionary mechanisms behind ferns and lycophytes diversification. We are interested in receiving original research, reviews or mini-reviews, opinions, and perspectives that address the following topics:

• Patterns of diversification in a genomic scale;
• Speciation patterns and processes;
• Roles of reticulation (e.g. hybridization) and polyploidization in diversification;
• Evolutionary developmental biology;
• Phenotypic evolution;
• Population genomics;
• Biogeography;
• Reproductive biology.