Press release: Uncovering ancient genetic toolkit that helped plants conquer land
No. 195 - 09.12.2025
Professor Jan de Vries at Göttingen University receives ERC Consolidator Grant
Biologist Professor Jan de Vries at the University of Göttingen has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). Following his ERC Starting Grant, which ran from 2019 to 2025, the ERC has now announced that they will fund his new project “Conserved Environmental Programs of Streptophyte Cells – StreptoProgram” for five years in the Consolidator program. The funding, which is worth just under two million euros, is for research by de Vries and his team to investigate how the fundamental toolkit evolved that land plants use to dominate our landscapes today.
All living land plants, from mosses to trees, belong to a single evolutionary line known as embryophytes. Their ancestors were freshwater algae. At some point around 600 million years ago, these algae not only survived on land but thrived there, giving rise to the extraordinary diversity of plant life we see now. The key to that success lies in a characteristic that all land plants share: an ability to adjust their growth and internal processes in response to challenging and highly changeable conditions on land. In other words, their biology is remarkably flexible. This flexibility depends on a flow of information within the cell – from sensing environmental cues such as drought or light, to activating the right internal responses. StreptoProgram will trace how this information-processing system evolved and what its core components are.
Recent studies have revealed that many of the genes once thought to be unique to land plants are also present, and active, in their algal relatives. With molecular tools now available, researchers can finally test how evolution combined these ancient genes into functioning networks that helped early plants cope with life on land. Over hundreds of millions of years, these genes took on multiple specialised roles in complex plant bodies, which makes it difficult to identify their original functions. To overcome this, the team will study a unicellular alga – Closterium – alongside plant cell cultures. By comparing both systems, they can focus on the basic gene networks that help cells adapt to environmental stress.
The project brings together genetic experiments with large-scale measurements of cellular activity over time, including protein regulation and gene expression. Using network analyses to integrate these datasets, the team will identify key genetic “hubs” that are shared across this ancient lineage — and determine where evolution introduced new connections. Göttingen is a particularly fruitful research environment for this endeavour, allowing to build on the decades of expertise and unique resources in the Culture Collection of Algae at Göttingen University, SAG. “Our work aims to reveal the fundamental genetic architecture that shaped the early evolution of land plants,” explains Vries. “This architecture describes the fundamental flow of information required for successful acclimation to environmental challenges—from external input to biological output.”
De Vries completed his BSc in Biology at TU Braunschweig, followed by an MSc in Biology from Uppsala University. He completed his PhD at Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, specialising in molecular evolution. He then carried out postdoctoral research at Dalhousie University in Canada, supported by a DFG Research Fellowship, before returning to Germany on a DFG Return Grant. In 2019, he joined the University of Göttingen as a Junior Professor of Applied Bioinformatics, and since 2022 has held a tenured Professorship at Göttingen University’s Institute for Microbiology and Genetics. He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2019 and is currently speaker of the 7.2 Million Euro DFG priority program on molecular plant evolution “MAdLand” (SPP 2237).
Contact:
Professor Jan de Vries
University of Göttingen
Faculty of Biology and Psychology
Institute of Microbiology and Genetics
Department of Applied Bioinformatics
37077 Göttingen, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)551 39-13995
Email: devries.jan@uni-goettingen.de