Biggest plant family tree
Always wanted to know how forget-me-nots and oak trees are related. Now you can find out using the up till now biggest ever family tree of flowering plants. Researchers recently published this family tree in Nature.
First a few numbers. 279 researchers out of 27 countries worked on the family tree. They used plant material from 163 herbariums from 48 countries. In total they gave 9506 species a place in the family tree. This is about 60% of all flowering plants, who in turn cover 85% of all the flowering plant genera.
90% of all plants are flowering plants. But about their evolutionary origins is less known that researchers would like. Earlier family trees were far from complete. What complicates answering evolutionary questions. This made the researchers wanting to change this.
The first challenge was to get plant material of all those different species. This the researchers solved by getting part of the material from herbariums. Using modern DNA isolation techniques the researchers could isolate enough good quality DNA out of dried plant material. This the researchers used this to sequence 353 genes from each species. In contrast with earlier family tree studies, the analysed genes were not from plastid but from the nuclear genome.
The family tree enables more than just the study of the evolutionary origin of flowering plants
The next challenge came by building the family tree. The current software programs that researches normally use for this could not handle the amount of data. To overcome this problem the researchers first made a skeleton of the family tree. Using 5 representatives of each plant family. Subsequently they made of each plant family a sub-family tree. This in turn they pasted within the skeleton of the big family tree. Giving a family tree that mostly was in agreement with previous family trees, but then in more detail.
Lastly the researchers dated the different points of branching off in the tree using fossils. One of the things they could decipher from this was that flowering plants originated between 154 and 247 million years ago.
The family tree enables to study the evolution of flowering plants in more detail. But in addition the tree can contribute to biodiversity research. It can help to predict the characteristics of plant species. Help by the identification of wild relatives of our crops. Help finding plant derived molecules used for drug development. Al together, the opportunities are as divers at the family tree itself.
Literature
Zuntini, A.R., Carruthers, T., Maurin, O. et al. Phylogenomics and the rise of the angiosperms. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07324-0
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