Plants are evolutionary champions, dominating Earth's ecosystems for more than a billion years and making the planet habitable for countless other life forms, including us. Now, scientists have completed a nine-year genetic quest to shine a light on the long, complex history of land plants and green algae, revealing the plot twists and furious pace of the rise of this super group of organisms. The project, known as the “One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative” (1KP), brought together nearly 200 plant biologists to sequence and analyze genes from more than 1,100 plant species spanning the green tree of life. A summary of the team’s findings was published online on October 23, 2019 in Nature. The open-access article is tited “One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes and the Phylogenomics of Green Plants.” "In the tree of life, everything is interrelated," said Gane Ka-Shu Wong, PhD, lead investigator of 1KP and Professor in the University of Alberta's Department of Biological Sciences. "And if we want to understand how the tree of life works, we need to examine the relationships between species. That's where genetic sequencing comes in." Much of plant research has focused on crops and a few model species, obscuring the evolutionary backstory of a clade that is nearly half a million species strong. To get a bird's-eye view of plant evolution, the 1KP team sequenced transcriptomes - the set of genes that is actively expressed to produce proteins - to illuminate the genetic underpinnings of green algae, mosses, ferns, conifers, flowering plants, and all other lineages of green plants.Login Or Register To Read Full Story