Their cosmopolitan distribution in a variety of biotopes including moist and arid environments, can be explained by unique adaptations like drought, freezing and salinity tolerance.

As a mostly avascular lineage, Bryophytes, that include mosses, liverworts and hornworts, thrive in mostly moist niches near the surface and stay compact (<10 cm), with some neovascularised exceptions that grow up to 65 cm. Mosses are plants that belong to the Bryophytes, a cosmopolitan sister group of vascular plants with the last common ancestor between 400 and 500 million years ago. Here we provide examples on how mosses exhibit advantages over vascular plants to study several processes and their future potential to answer some other outstanding questions in plant cell biology. This has become possible thanks to its fully established molecular toolkit, with highly efficient PEG-assisted, CRISPR/Cas9 and RNAi transformation and silencing protocols, among others. Importantly, this model organism has a simplified and accessible body structure that facilitates close tracking in time and space with the support of live cell imaging set-ups and multiple reporter lines. It has been shown that many gene functions and networks are conserved in mosses when compared to angiosperms. patens was the first fully sequenced moss in 2008, with the latest annotated release in 2018. The species Physcomitrium patens has helped gaining better understanding of the biological processes of the plant cell, and it has become a central system to understand water-to-land plant transition through 2D-to-3D growth transition, regulation of asymmetric cell division, shoot apical cell establishment and maintenance, phyllotaxis and regeneration. Mosses are a cosmopolitan group of land plants, sister to vascular plants, with a high potential for molecular and cell biological research.

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