Unraveling ethylene biology in non-seed plants

We know a lot about ethylene biology in seed plants. But little is known about this phytohormone in non-seed plants. We use the model species Marchantia polymorpha, a liverwort, to study how plants learned to produce, sense and response to ethylene and it's precursor ACC. This will help us understand the importance of this gasseous phytohormone in plant evolution, its conservation across the plant Kingodm, and how ethylene might have played an important role in how plants colonized land 450 million years ago.