Comparative analysis of lipids in Funaria hygrometrica Hdew from different habitats

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Bryophytes occur in most terrestrial and freshwater environments. They are effective monitors of the environmental change as they take up nutrients and pollutants directly from the atmosphere due to the lack of the root system (Holoubek et al., 2000). For instance, Sphagnum species (aquatic bryophyte) in the peat bog can sensitively respond to the climate change and therefore the paleoenvironmental proxies based on their lipids have been proposed (Xie et al., 2003). Previous work on bryophytes mainly focused on their function as the indicators of regional atmospheric deposition (Gerdol et al., 2002) and lipid distributions (Baas et al., 2000). Less is known about the relationship between lipid distributions and the environmental change. Here we report a terrestrial bryophyte species, Funaria hygrometrica Hdew collected from three different habitats, to compare their lipid distributions and compound-specific carbon isotope composition of n-alkanes.