In the past decade, many plant genomes have been completely sequenced ranging from unicellular alga to trees. This rich resource of information raises questions like: How did specific transporters evolve as early plants adapted to dry land? How did the evolution of transporters in monocot plants differ from that in dicots? What are the functional orthologs in food and energy crops of transporters characterized in model plants? How do we name the new genes/proteins? Phylogenetic analyses of transport proteins will shed light on these questions and potentially reveal novel insights for future studies to understand plant nutrition, stress tolerance, biomass production, signaling and development.