Study helps to solve Darwin’s mystery about ancient plant evolution

Yellow poplar tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), a basal angiosperm included in the study led by Claude dePamphilis. This plant was included in the Ancestral Angiosperm Genome Project. The evolution and diversification of the more than 300,000 living species of flowering plants may have been "jump started" much earlier than previously calculated, a new study indicates. According to Claude dePamphilis, a professor of biology at Penn State and the lead author of the study, which includes scientists at six universities, two major upheavals in the plant genome occurred hundreds of millions of years ago - nearly 200 million years earlier than the events that other research groups had described. The research also indicates that these upheavals produced thousands of new genes that may have helped drive the evolutionary explosion that led to the rich diversity of present-day flowering plants. The study, which provides a wealth of new genetic data and a more precise evolutionary time scale, is expected to change the way biologists view the family trees of plants in general and flowering plants in particular. To see photos associated with this research, visit http://live.psu.edu/flickrset/72157626350083355 online.