Structural Diversity Among Plastid Genomes of Land Plants

Abstract The plastome of land plants is often considered to be highly conserved in sequence, structure, and content. This is particularly true for nonvascular land plants, for which few changes to the plastome have occurred throughout their evolutionary history. In vascular plants, however, the plastomic structure is more dynamic. Many lycophytes, most ferns, and particular lineages of seed plants have experienced extensive structural rearrangements, including inversions and modifications to the size and content of the IR. In this review, we describe the typical structural features of the land plant plastome, the major variations to this canonical structure that occur in various lineages, and the evolutionary implications of this structural variation.