A groundbreaking project has mapped the DNA of over 9,500 flowering plants, providing new insights into plant evolution and making the data freely available for research in biodiversity and other scientific fields. Credit: SciTechDaily.comsequences between different species to identify changes that accumulate over time like a molecular fossil record. Our understanding of the tree of life is rapidly improving due to advances in DNA sequencing technology.
Among the species sequenced, more than 800 had never had their DNA sequenced before. This sequencing was essential to fill in important knowledge gaps and shed new light on the evolutionary history of flowering plants. The researchers also benefited from publicly available data for more than 1,900 species, highlighting the value of the open science approach to future genomic research.
Using 200 fossils, the researchers traced their tree of life back in time to show how flowering plants evolved over geological time. They found that early flowering plants did indeed explode in diversity, as Darwin noted. The rapid development of these plants gave rise, shortly after their origin, to over 80% of the major lineages that exist today.
The flowering plant tree of life has enormous potential for biodiversity research. This is because, just as one can predict the properties of an element based on its position in the periodic table, the location of a species in the tree of life allows us to predict its properties. The new data will therefore be invaluable in improving many areas of science and beyond.
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