Colombian scientists helped build the world’s most complete ‘Tree of Life’ featuring more than 300,000 flowering plants.

Although it appeared later, today Those that have flowers are the most abundant group of plants on EarthWe can see them in the hotter tropical regions, as well as on rocky outcrops in Antarctica. It is also a source of food, medicines, dyes, and other basic uses for humans, in addition to its amazing variety and versatility. Their ability to adapt and survive environmental changes has made them a subject of study for thousands of years..

As a result of this curiosity, the gigantic mission embarked on by an international team of researchers emerged Construct the most complete tree of life from the DNA of these plants that has been achieved to dateThis is a mission that has achieved significant progress this year.

This study was published in the journal Nature and was conducted previously Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London, United Kingdom) and 279 scientists participated, including ColombiansOscar A. Pérez Escobar, principal researcher at Keio University, and Andrés Urguilla Ramírez, professor at the University of Cartagena. The team has achieved the astonishing goal of sampling the genetic information of about 60 percent of about 8,000 known genera.

For this They used about 1.8 billion genetic codes from more than 9,500 species. This is unprecedented until now, as they had to resort not only to plant samples collected today, but also to ancient herbal samples, explains Pérez Escobar. “One of the most interesting things about this project is that a large portion of the data that has been used to produce this family tree is from very ancient, in some cases even extinct, populations from which only dry stored materials are no longer known to exist in their natural habitat.” “

Access to the Factory Archives was only possible thanks to the participation and cooperation of 138 international organizations. In this way, the researchers relied on 15 times more data than any similar study previously conducted on the tree of life of flowering plants, including more than 800 species whose DNA sequences had not previously been determined.

The amount of information that it takes a single computer about 18 years to process constitutes an important advance in this initiative. Kew “Tree of Life”. The project, which began in 2015, seeks to reconstruct the genetic genealogy of 330,000 known species of flowering plants by collecting genomic data from at least one species from each recorded genus. next to mushroom.

An evolutionary roadmap they consider essential for exploring, predicting and exploiting the properties of life on Earth. “From identifying new species in science to discovering new biomolecules or crops, the potential of the tree of life is enormous, but it has not yet been fully exploited because many of its branches remain unknown,” they say from Kew.

at the moment Researchers in the project are working to complete the backbone of global plant evolution at the genus level By sequencing approximately 5,600 genera of flowering plants by 2025.

This tree of life is a family tree of plants that allows us to understand how different species are related to each other thanks to comparing the DNA sequences of different species to trace the mutations that may occur in them over time and their evolution.

This is an ambitious investigation that also seeks to get closer to solving the problem Charles Darwin Call “The obnoxious mysteryOr how angiosperms, or flowering plants, managed to completely dominate the planet with impressive diversity in a relatively short time in geological terms.

“This is a mystery to biologists, this evolutionary innovation that angiosperms have that allowed them to diversify so quickly and so suddenly,” explains Andrés Urjuela Ramírez, who participated in Q’s study during his doctoral studies, and who specializes in the Solanaceae family, to which tomatoes and lolo belong. “This work has led to a significant increase in sampling, which will allow us to be more certain about the results.” For example.

More than 200 plant fossils were incorporated into Kew’s study, allowing them to explore the diversity of species as they appeared over time. “While most lineages of flowering plants appeared in the first flowering period after the first flowering plants appeared more than 140 million years ago, new evidence points to slower and more stable rates of emergence of new species over the next 100 million years, until a second surge in diversification occurred about 40 million years ago.” One million years from the present.

This second diversification of flowering plants probably coincided with A Global drop in temperatures, according to experts. Data that, if Darwin were alive today, would have astounded him, are now available for all scientists in the world to draw upon to conduct research that leads them to understand how and why species diversify.

For Pérez Escobar, who led the research into the orchid family, among the applications of the information contained in this tree of life is also the possibility of identifying wild species that provide desirable characteristics that can be applied to genetic improvement of crops and also a better understanding of how they interact with pests and diseases. In addition, it is also expected that it will be possible to learn from the species patterns that have allowed these plants to be so diverse, which is important information to protect them from invasion. Climate change.

Q experts point out that it resembles a kind of periodic table of elements. “You can usually point to an area of ​​the table and get a good idea of ​​the properties of an element based on its location: for example, whether it is a solid or a liquid at room temperature, or whether it is radioactive or radioactive.” stable. The tree of life works in a similar way. “We can predict the characteristics of some plants based on what we know about their closest species,” they say.

This opens the possibility, for example, of being able to trace a more efficient path to searching for chemical compounds with medical potential than those that have already been discovered so far. In fact, Kew is already using this information in a project where it uses artificial intelligenceResearch plants that can help create new treatments against malaria

Alejandra Lopez Plazas
Science Editing
@malelopezpl
@ScienceTime