An international team of scientists has created the tree of life for almost 8,000 (about 60%) genera of flowering plants (angiosperms). This achievement sheds new light on the evolutionary history of flowering plants and their rise to ecological dominance on Earth.
Flowering plants account for about 90% of all known plant life on land and are found virtually everywhere on the planet — from the steamiest tropics to the rocky outcrops of the Antarctic Peninsula.
These plants originated more than 140 million years ago after which they rapidly overtook other vascular plants including their closest living relatives — the gymnosperms (nonflowering plants that have naked seeds, such as cycads, conifers and ginkgo).
Our understanding of how flowering plants came to dominate the scene soon after their origin has baffled scientists for generations, including Charles Darwin.
For new research, the authors used 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera (ca. 60%). More than 800 of these species have never had their DNA sequenced before.
“Analyzing this unprecedented amount of data to decode the information hidden in millions of DNA sequences was a huge challenge,” said Dr. Alexandre Zuntini, a researcher at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
“But it also offered the unique opportunity to reevaluate and extend our knowledge of the plant tree of life, opening a new window to explore the complexity of plant evolution.”
“Flowering plants feed, clothe and greet us whenever we walk into the woods,” said Professor Stephen Smith, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan.
“The construction of a flowering plant tree of life has been a significant challenge and goal for the field of evolutionary biology for more than a century.”
“This project moves us closer to that goal by providing a massive dataset for most of the genera of flowering plants and offering one strategy to complete…
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