One thousand plant transcriptomes and the phylogenomics of green plants

Leebens-Mack, J., Barker, M. S., Carpenter, E. J. and et al. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7440-0133 (2019) One thousand plant transcriptomes and the phylogenomics of green plants. Nature, 574. pp. 679-685. ISSN 0028-0836 doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1693-2

Abstract/Summary

Green plants (Viridiplantae) include around 450,000–500,000 species of great diversity and have important roles in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Here, as part of the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative, we sequenced the vegetative transcriptomes of 1,124 species that span the diversity of plants in a broad sense (Archaeplastida), including green plants (Viridiplantae), glaucophytes (Glaucophyta) and red algae (Rhodophyta). Our analysis provides a robust phylogenomic framework for examining the evolution of green plants. Most inferred species relationships are well supported across multiple species tree and supermatrix analyses, but discordance among plastid and nuclear gene trees at a few important nodes highlights the complexity of plant genome evolution, including polyploidy, periods of rapid speciation, and extinction. Incomplete sorting of ancestral variation, polyploidization and massive expansions of gene families punctuate the evolutionary history of green plants. Notably, we find that large expansions of gene families preceded the origins of green plants, land plants and vascular plants, whereas whole-genome duplications are inferred to have occurred repeatedly throughout the evolution of flowering plants and ferns. The increasing availability of high-quality plant genome sequences and advances in functional genomics are enabling research on genome evolution across the green tree of life.

Additional Information	The full author list is available on the publisher website.
Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/86981
Identification Number/DOI	10.1038/s41586-019-1693-2
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Biological Sciences > Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Central Services > Academic and Governance Services > University Museums and Special Collections
Additional Information	The full author list is available on the publisher website.
Publisher	Nature Publishing Group
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