ABSTRACT
Water is essential for life, and living organisms evolved a highly diverse fam-ily of membrane channel proteins termed aquaporins (AQPs) for controlling water intake. While pioneer studies mostly reported AQPs from vertebrate and angiosperm model systems, the discovery of AQPs in poorly known groups and non-model organisms has been greatly accelerated in recent years, thanks to the wealth of complete or ongoing genomic and transcriptomic projects. Yet the diversity of membrane intrinsic proteins is far from being completely characterized. e fast accumulation of AQP sequences from a myriad of organisms with very dierent evolutionary and life histories is providing a more complete portrait of how AQP diversity distributes among living organisms, which interpreted within a phylogenetic framework opens new possibilities for the study of the evolutionary processes underlying diversication of this fundamental protein family.
