Researchers from around the world and several Canadian universities say it’s taken nine years of work to analyze the genetics of 1,100 plant species from algae to elm trees. That work, released Wednesday in the journal Nature, has allowed them to pinpoint a billion years of evolutionary relationships between plants as different as cannabis and cucumbers, orchids and oaks.
They isolated and sequenced genetic RNA material from 1,124 different plant species. They took care to select a wide variety of plant types and not to focus on species, such as cereal crops, important to humans.“One of the things biologists constantly argue over is which came before what. How did this species evolve?”
“Can we, from the RNA sequence, draw this tree of life for all 1,000 species?” asked Wong. “For 95 per cent or so, the answer is, yes, we can do it quite well and probably better than you could do by just looking.”
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