From flat moss to forests and flowers: New discovery may explain how plants conquered land

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have identified a previously unknown protein that may help explain how plants managed to colonize land more than 400 million years ago

University of Copenhagen

X

LinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Images of moss during three-dimensional growth. Left: abnormal bud development in when RAK1 is not present. Right: normal bud formation.

view more 

Credit: Photos: Laura Moody

If plants had never learned to grow in multiple directions, our world would look very different. No trees, flowers or other complex plants – and therefore no animals or humans.

New research from the University of Copenhagen now suggests that a specific protein in moss may have been crucial for this key step in plant evolution – a step that made life on land possible. Around 470 million years ago, plant cells developed the ability to divide into three dimensions and grow upwards and sideways. Until then, as aquatic organisms, they had only grown in a two-dimensional flat form, limiting how complex they could evolve.

The newly identified protein likely arose through evolution by combining two previously existing proteins into a single protein. The researchers do not yet know exactly when this fusion occurred, but it may have played a role in the early transition of plants to life on land.

“We have identified a protein that has never been seen before and that has very special properties. It helps us gain a better understanding of how land plants function,” explains one of the study’s authors, Eleazar Rodriguez, Associate Professor in Functional Genomics at the Department of Biology.

If you look at a tree today, its growth depends on fundamental biological mechanisms that emerged early in plant evolution. These include how cells divide in different directions, how cells obtain energy for growth, and how proteins are regulated within the cell.

These are the mechanisms that the researchers now provide new insight into, dating back roughly 470 million years.

“Without the ability to grow in three dimensions, the landscape would look very different. We would not see trees and shrubs grow the way they do today. Life on land would likely have remained much more limited,” says Thomas Juel Ammitsøe, postdoc and co–first author of the study.

Removing the newly discovered protein

The researchers identified the previously unknown protein, named RAK1, in a moss species. The protein is a fusion between two types of proteins already known – a signaling protein (kinase) and an acetyltransferase. When present, it has a specific effect in the moss: by influencing the cell’s energy metabolism, it enables cells to divide in multiple directions and form buds and shoots.

This became clear when the researchers compared two versions of the same moss. In one, RAK1 was present; in the other, it had been removed.

“We observed that cells in the moss lacking RAK1 did not divide properly and formed defective buds. This shows that RAK1 may have been crucial for enabling the moss to grow efficiently,” explains the study’s co–first author, assistant professor Cloe De Luxan Hernandez.

Proteins are the workers of the cell

Moss represents some of the earliest land plants that began to grow on Earth. Until now, the explanation for how moss developed the ability to grow in three dimensions has focused on gene regulation – specifically that certain genes are switched on and off at the right time.

The researchers from the University of Copenhagen now build on this explanation by showing that simply turning genes on and off is not sufficient. The newly discovered RAK1 helps coordinate the metabolic balance needed for three-dimensional growth.

The discovery of RAK1 highlights that evolution does not always invent something entirely new – sometimes it simply combines existing elements in new ways.

“Our findings suggest that the transition from flat to three-dimensional plant growth depends not only on gene regulation, but also on precise metabolic control during stem cell division and bud formation,” says Eleazar Rodriguez.

The discovery therefore provides not only new knowledge about moss, but also insight into fundamental mechanisms underlying growth in living organisms.

Like human stem cells, moss stem cells depend on tightly controlled metabolism during growth and division. Our findings suggest that RAK1 is part of this regulatory system,” concludes Eleazar Rodriguez.

 

[[ Fact box 1: Moss as an ideal model system

Mosses represent some of the earliest land plants on Earth and are thought to have evolved from algae-like ancestors that originally lived in water.

Moss is widely used in research to study plant development because of its relatively simple organization and evolutionary position as the first type of land plant.

In this study, the researchers used the model moss Physcomitrium patens, one of the most well-studied moss species.

 

Fact box 2: Difference between two-dimensional and three-dimensional growth

Moss can grow in flat structures made up of thread-like filaments, characteristic of two-dimensional growth. In this stage, cells divide in two directions, allowing the moss to spread across the surface.

When cells switch to three-dimensional growth, they begin to divide in multiple directions and form buds. These give rise to more complex structures, enabling the moss to grow upwards and form more complex organs such as leaves.

 

Fact box 3: How the researchers studied RAK1

The researchers identified a protein, RAK1, which is a fusion between a signaling protein (kinase) and an acetyl transferase.

They then compared moss with and without RAK1.

They found that moss lacking RAK1 was unable to divide effectively in multiple dimensions.

In contrast, the presence of RAK1 enabled cells to respond to signals and develop properly into three-dimensional structures.

RAK1 acts as a link between cellular signaling and intracellular chemical regulation, enabling cells to transition to three-dimensional growth.

 

Fact box 4: About the study

The results are published in the journal New Phytologist, which focuses on plant science research.

A total of 18 researchers contributed to the study.

The study was conducted as part of a broader international collaborative effort involving researchers from Austria, England, Germany and Japan.

Read the study ]]

---

Journal

New Phytologist

DOI

10.1111/nph.71214 

Article Title

An N-acetyltransferase-MAPK fusion protein modulates developmental reprogramming in Physcomitrium patens

 

Picture of the moss used in the study.

Credit

Photo: Cloe De Luxan Hernandez

manifesto-library.espivblogshttps://manifesto-library.espivblogs.net  › files  › 2018  › 10  › Ursula-K.-Le-Guin-Word-for-World-is-Forest-1984-Berkley.pdf

The Word for World is Forest By Ursula K. Le Guin

down, and the top, so far, is humans. We're here, now; and so this world's going to go ... Quarter-sphere. And all those flecks and blobs of land...

en.wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org  › wiki  › The_Word_for_World_Is_Forest

The Word for World Is Forest - Wikipedia

The Word for World Is Forest is a science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in the United States in 1972...

Tree-Killers Are Sick, the Nation is Sick, Forests Are Not

Steve Kelly

 May 29, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Clearcut in the Oregon Coast Range. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

As Americans celebrate the 250^th year of this young nation’s existence, perhaps we could take a moment to reflect upon where and what we were in 1776, and what we have become.  This is a good time to critique how we’ve treated this great continent that nurtures us and mourn the many ‘disappeared’ lifeforms that once roamed the plains, forests, and waters of the United States.

The wild mountainous ecosystems surrounding Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks are being liquidated, habitat turned to wasteland as the resident sentient beings of these territories are mercilessly killed off.

As an activist advocating for wilderness, forests and habitat for native wildlife and fish, the combination of natural and man-caused catastrophes is reaching unfathomable proportions.  Rather than take some responsibility for our mistakes, denial and indifference has gripped our hearts, minds, and souls.

Shouldn’t ‘good,’ and powerful Puritans, Zionists, and Techno-fascist billionaires (oligarchs) begin to have regrets at some point before every acre of wild land has been bulldozed, clearcut, overgrazed, and set on fire? Before all the songbirds and hummingbirds have vanished from the countryside, original art, poetry, and music has been extinguished, along with human imagination, visions, and dreams, we must find ways to stop the plunder.

Modern society’s ruling elite can’t seem to constrain its infantile desire to meddle with the great mysteries of the Universe that creates and restores beauty and magic in our untrammeled remnant territories. Worst of all, these ruling class pirates employ their machines and common slaves to control one another, registering, tracking, and policing each other in a meaningless system of mutually un-beneficial depravity.

Can everyone see clearly now?  Money and power are relative, the supreme goal of an oligarch’s worth (his/her/its salt) is enslaving everyone else to objectify and exploit Nature and overproduce man-made things, and then produce more things, all to end up in the local dump.  There is no aim.  

Before Christian colonization and mechanization many species shared, cooperated, competed, adapted, and survived through a complex, asymmetrical multi-layered system of interrelationships that encouraged species diversity and persistence through challenging natural and man-made events. When these myriad processes and relationships are broken down the remote backcountry dies.  It is all becoming too much for human discernment to handle.

Self-criticism is consistently the piece missing and point at which hubris begins to obscure understanding natural limits that press against the current ‘unreality.’ Distraction and denial prevent our looking beyond, to see the abyss at the end of the path we’re on.

The U.S. Forest Service (USDA) and Bureau of Land Management (USDI) are a great example of what ills America today.  Rather than heal their own internal sickness first, these disgruntled slaves push deadly misdiagnoses and ‘treatments.’  They shamelessly promote dangerous narratives to cover up their heinous crimes against Nature.  Computer programs crank out fear campaigns that scream of unacceptable risk of wildfire, insect epidemic and disease.

There is no rational reason to explain how, or why, clearcutting and deliberately burning millions of acres of healthy public forests can “save” them.  The USFS and BLM have transformed into massive, senseless hospital operations.

Wild backcountry is being disposed of without a thought to the cost of treating misdiagnosed, fake forest health issues. Billions of tax dollars are wasted annually on unnecessary treatments which are converting healthy forests into deserts and failed tree plantations. It’s the boondoggle that keeps on giving.

Our national forests are not sick!

Public forests and grasslands are perpetually healing themselves without man’s meddling.  It’s nature’s way, and a whole lot less expensive.

Cheer up.  These useless federal agencies are facing down their own Death Clock. I hear it ticking.

Exceptionally scrappy, reliable grassroots forces have been fighting for decades to keep our public lands and human sensibilities from being murdered and hauled off to the landfill.  A small gift can make a big difference.

Check out my top two favorites at:

1) allianceforthewildrockies.org

and

2) counterppunch.org

Steve Kelly is a an artist and environmental activist. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.  

manifesto-library.espivblogshttps://manifesto-library.espivblogs.net  › files  › 2018  › 10  › Ursula-K.-Le-Guin-Word-for-World-is-Forest-1984-Berkley.pdf

The Word for World is Forest By Ursula K. Le Guin

down, and the top, so far, is humans. We're here, now; and so this world's going to go ... Quarter-sphere. And all those flecks and blobs of land...

Is There a Future Without Incarceration? Abolitionist Art Shows Us One.

Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present.

By Nicholas Powers , 

Truthout

May 23, 2026

Still from Space to Breathe.

I banged my head on the bars. It was 2:00 am. I was in a Brooklyn jail. Under the fluorescent light, other men slept on the bench. Each one of us was arrested for so-called quality-of-life crimes like drinking a beer on a stoop, blasting a radio, or being unhoused. I shook the bars again. The walls closed in on me. I had a hard time breathing.

When I got out the next day, neighbors told me their lockdown stories. In many cities around the U.S., going to jail is a rite of passage. So many generations of us, men of color, have cycled through prison. It shaped how we see our future. I didn’t want that to be my future, or my son’s future.

I spent a short time in jail, but many of my neighbors spent years behind bars. Every day, more and more people are being arrested. Now the Trump administration is expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jails, and more are threatened with imprisonment as the administration labels left-wing groups and individuals “domestic terrorists.” Add to this the use of artificial intelligence to enhance state and corporate surveillance, and we face a future of the U.S. becoming a totalitarian carceral state.

Is a world without prisons possible?

It is, but it begins in the artistic imagination. We see, listen and read art, but rarely learn about art that challenges the powerful. Yet, overlooked by critics is prison abolitionist art. It literally spans centuries. You see it in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from 380 B.C. and in the 2025 Afrofuturist film Space to Breathe. Prison abolitionist art has three major themes: using prison as a metaphor for society; showing how the mind escapes metaphorical prisons; and, finally, imagining a world without mass incarceration.

Interview |
Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s Not Enough to Abolish ICE — We Have to Abolish Police
“What’s happening now has happened before,” Kelley said, underscoring the anti-Blackness foundational to US fascism. By George Yancy , Truthout February 26, 2026

A strong, popular social movement can fight it. We need a vision to guide it. Prison abolitionist art shows the way.

A Nation Behind Bars

“Land of the free and home of the brave,” the crowd sings. When I go to sports events, people with a beer buzzed from beer sing the national anthem. When the last note is sung, the stadium erupts in cheers. Yet I don’t join. Underneath the patriotism is a bleaker reality: for many, the U.S. is a prison.

The U.S. is the independent democracy with the highest incarceration rate in the world. The U.S. has roughly 342 million people; according to the Prison Policy Initiative, 2 million are jailed at any given time. When you read that number, it is important to know two things. First, mass incarceration is a pyramid of federal and state prisons as well as immigration jails. Add local and juvenile jails. Add CIA foreign black sites and overseas ICE jails. The U.S. prison system is like one of those face-hugger parasites from the movie Alien, feeding off the host. Each year, 10.5 million people are arrested, or one every three seconds.

Second is that prison is larger than the physical cell. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 650,000 people are released from prison each year, but “two-thirds will likely be arrested in three years.” Why this revolving door? Well, of the 19 million people convicted of a felony and the 79 million who have a criminal record, re-entry into life is a gauntlet of obstacles. The Sentencing Project paints a vivid portrait of post-prison life: Very few rehabilitation programs. Minimal financial resources. Employees often don’t hire people convicted of felonies. Landlords discriminate. Some people convicted of felonies can’t vote or get public housing. They face stigma and isolation. They become an invisible underclass.

Put two and two together and what becomes clear is that mass incarceration is a factory that transforms millions of people a day into permanent prisoners. Even when it spits them out and they are technically “freed,” they face poverty, depression, and stigma that drives them right back into jail — which, by the way, costs $445 billion a year. Whole generations of people are destroyed so money can be made.

Many of us feel rage at being jailed. The anger is stuffed down until you take your child to a playground in a bright afternoon. You can’t help but worry which one will be caught by that system. Who is going to get jailed later in life? You hate that you even have to think about it. But you do. And you hold your child even tighter.

Prison Society

Is there a way out? Yes, but the first step is using prison as a kind of prism to analyze society itself. Incarcerated artists created, and continue to create, a canon spanning literature, cinema, and music that does exactly that. Through their art you grasp “jail” as something more than a physical building; it can be the structure of a whole society.

You probably were taught in school about “the canon,” or works of art that one must know to be considered “literate.” Maybe they were of exceptional quality. Maybe they helped define a people. Think Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The prison art canon is work by incarcerated artists who explore civil corruption and self-transformation. Prison literature specifically began as fragmentary scenes in other books like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in his book The Republic. The canon really gets going in The Consolation of Philosophy, written in 523 A.D. by the philosopher Boethius, the original prisoner-author, while he was unjustly jailed before his execution in 524. Others followed, like Thomas Usk in the 14th century, who wrote The Testament of Love, or George Ashby’s A Prisoner’s Reflections, written in the 15th century. The European tradition of prison literature hit a high point in the 18th century with Marquis de Sade’s sexual mysticism composed in jail.

In the U.S., the tradition of European prison literature morphed into prison abolitionist art. It went beyond merely describing jail or civic corruption to placing self-transformation as the first step to social change. It imagined a world beyond prisons. The first book in this genre was Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative. No, he was not held in a modern jail, but he analyzed slavery as an open-air prison. Slavery, like modern prison, held people captive. It stripped one’s identity. It used violence to force obedience. It taught enslaved people to obey rules to gain easier work. After Douglass escaped and became a famous orator, he was in Washington, D.C., surrounded by powerful politicians. He bitterly realized free whites acted like slaves. They faced poverty and punishment. They lied to get favors. Society was just an open-air plantation. He wrote, “The same traits of character seen in slaves, are seen in the slaves of political parties.”

More than a century after Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” again used the prison metaphor to describe life under racial segregation. He wrote of the open-air prison of segregation, “when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next.” A supposedly free society was like a large jail.

You see the prison metaphor 136 years after Douglass in the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre, in which the protagonist Andre says to his friend Wallace that modern life is “…the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built — they’ve built their own prison.”

The prison metaphor, or seeing the U.S. through the prism of the prison, is a common theme. You see it in films like the Matrix and Hunger Games trilogies. You see it in books like George Jackson’s 1972 Blood in My Eye or Assata Shakur’s self-titled 1987 autobiography, Assata. You see it in new works like Jean Trounstine’s 2026 novel, Sounds Like Trouble to Me, in which a former prison guard murders her abusive husband. When she is jailed, she faces the same brutality that she once dished out.

The Illusion of Freedom

Within prison abolitionist art is a shocking contradiction: Freedom is found in confinement. The isolated mind is cut from attachments. In that isolation, one sees through illusions like consumerism, job status, or patriotism. In Boethius’s The Consolations of Philosophy, he writes, “…human souls are free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood.” The scene of a prisoner-artist freed from illusion appears through centuries. Nearly 1,500 years later, Malcolm X described in his autobiography the power of learning in prison: “I knew right there in prison that reading had changed my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside of me some dormant desire to mentally alive.”

In prison abolitionist art, two essential themes appear. The first is to use prison as a lens to analyze society. The second, to show how isolation can be subverted as tool of oppression and used to free the mind from the illusions of freedom that exist beyond bars. What sets the genre of prison abolition art apart from prison art is that the former imagines a future free of incarceration.

Until Everybody’s Free

The world is at the crossroads. On one side, we see signs of mass AI-driven unemployment, coupled with an AI-driven police state. It is a dystopic future: Millions of people warehoused in prisons, guarded by robots. On the other hand, we hear calls for universal health care, moratoriums on data centers, care instead of cops, and as one book title says, a Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

What prison abolitionist art does is provide a vision of a future with no jails. Maybe that’s why science fiction takes the lead. Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed portrays two planets, one capitalist, named Urras, the other an anarchist commune, named Anarres. Its citizens, called the Annaresti, do not use prisons but severe social shaming. Another sci-fi franchise that imagines a future with very little use for prisons is “Star Trek.” Aside from a few villains, you don’t see anyone in jail. In a classic “Next Generation” episode, Picard tells a man who was frozen that in the 24th century, there is no scarcity. He said, “A lot has changed in the past 300 years. We are no longer obsessed with accumulation of things. We eliminated hunger, want and the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Prison abolitionist art creates a future to briefly live in, and from that place, turn and look at our present. We can ask questions, again. We can hope, too. Recently, I had friends over to binge-watch shows with a prison abolitionist theme. Of course, “Star Trek” episodes were played, but we ended with Space to Breathe, directed by Juicebox P. Burton. It is a sci-fi short film that is campy, Afrofuturist, yet sincere. It portrayed three Black youth in a future with no prisons, looking back at the revolution that ended in Abolition Day, the day when the dismantling of mass incarceration began in this fictional history. Burton told Truthout, “We made this film as a gift to organizers, to help them imagine a different world. To show that their hard work today is building a more, free future.” The movie is showing at Reclamation Day in Brooklyn on June 20th, and activists already are talking about it.

I was lucky to have a link to preview it and showed it to a few friends. As we watched, we were deeply moved by the use of real people, talking in a circle about restorative justice, and footage of former prisoners released and hugged by family. One elder with thick glasses said, “Take the money that’s going for jail and put it into Black community for services like health care and jobs, so people can live.”

Space to Breathe did not have the big budget of “Star Trek.” But seeing Black people in the next century, living in a world we could only dream of, deeply touched us. After it ended, we sat imagining who our children’s children could be. They were radiant. They were free. The room was quiet — so quiet that for a moment, you could hear the future.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Nicholas Powers
Nicholas Powers is the author of Thirst, a political vampire novel; The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street; and most recently, Black Psychedelic Revolution. He has been writing for Truthout since 2011. His article, “Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life” in the Truthout anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? coalesces his years of reporting on police brutality.