Ancient Evolution of Flowering Plants

[Tank]

New Genetic Study Helps Solve Darwin's Mystery About Ancient Evolution of Flowering Plants

ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2011) â€" 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 University 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...

Genetic research continues to expand our understanding of evolution.

[Recusant]

Thanks for the link to that interesting story, Tank.  The whole topic of polyploidy has been something which intrigued me since I first learned about it when studying (and practicing) guerrilla horticulture in my youth.