Evolutionary trails of plant steroid genes

• Biosynthesis of phytosterols and part of the brassinosteroid (BR) signaling pathway arose in algae.
• The canonical BR signaling pathway exists in land plant species only.
• Plant steroid genes with high and ubiquitous expression tend to be highly conserved.

Plant steroids – brassinosteroids (BRs) and their precursors, phytosterols – play a major role in plant growth, development, stress tolerance, and have high potential for agricultural applications. Currently, this prospect is limited by a lack of information about their evolution and expression dynamics (spatial and temporal) across plant species. The increasing number of sequenced genomes offers an opportunity for evolutionary studies that might help to prioritize functional analyses with the aim to improve crop yield and stress tolerance. In this review we provide a glimpse of the origin, evolution, and functional conservation of phytosterol and BR genes in the green plant lineage using comparative sequence and expression analyses of publicly available datasets.