Colombian scientists helped build the most complete tree of life of flowering plants in the world

Although they appeared later, today Those that have flowers are the most abundant group of plants on earth, we can see them in the hottest tropics as well as on the rocky outcrops of Antarctica. They are also a source of food, medicines, tinctures and other fundamental uses for human beings, this, added to their impressive diversity and Their ability to adapt and survive environmental changes has made them an object of study for thousands of years..

As a result of this curiosity, the titanic task arose in which an international team of researchers embarked to build the most complete tree of life from the DNA of these plants that has been achieved so fara mission that this year has yielded important progress.

Published in the journal Nature, the study was led from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London, United Kingdom) and had the participation of 279 scientists, including Colombians Oscar A. Pérez-Escobar, leading researcher at Kew, and Andrés Orjuela Ramírez, professor at the University of Cartagena. A team that achieved the incredible goal of sampling the genetic information of approximately 60 percent of the almost 8,000 known genera.

For this They used about 1.8 billion genetic codes from more than 9,500 species. Something never seen to date for which they had to resort not only to samples of plants collected today but also old herbarium specimens, as Pérez-Escobar explains. “One of the most interesting things about this project was that a good part of the data that was used to produce this family tree is from very old collections, in some cases even extinct and from which only dry stored material is known and no longer known. They are found in their natural environment.”

Having access to these ‘plant archives’ was only possible thanks to the participation and collaboration of 138 international organizations. In this way, the researchers drew on 15 times more data than any comparable study previously conducted on the tree of life of flowering plants, including more than 800 species that had never before had their DNA sequenced.

A magnitude of information that a single computer would take about 18 years to process and that constitutes an important advance in the initiative. Kew’s ‘Tree of Life’. The project, which began in 2015, seeks to reconstruct the genetic genealogy of the 330,000 known species of flowering plants by collecting genomic data from at least one species of each recorded genus. Besides fungus.

An evolutionary roadmap that they consider essential for the exploration, prediction and exploitation of the properties of life on Earth. “From the identification of species new to science to the discovery of biomolecules or novel crops, the potential of the tree of life is immense, but it has not yet been fully exploited because many of its branches remain unknown,” they say from Kew.

At the moment Project researchers are working to complete the backbone of global plant evolution at the genus level by sequencing the remaining 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 the comparison of the DNA sequences of different species to track mutations that may have occurred in them over time. time and its evolution.

This is an ambitious investigation that also seeks to get closer to solving what Charles Darwin called the ‘abominable mystery‘, or how angiosperms or flowering plants managed to completely dominate the planet with impressive diversity in a relatively short time in geological terms.

“That is a mystery for biologists, that evolutionary innovation that angiosperms have that allowed them to diversify so quickly, so abruptly. This work greatly increased the sampling, which will allow us to be a little more certain about the results,” explains Andrés Orjuela Ramírez, who participated in the Kew study during his doctoral studies, specializing in the nightshade family, which tomatoes and lulos belong, for example.

More than 200 plant fossils were incorporated into the Kew study, allowing them to explore the diversification of species as they emerged over time. “While most lineages of flowering plants emerged in the first boom period after the appearance of the first flowering plants more than 140 million years ago, new evidence points to slower, more stable rates of emergence of new ones. species during the following 100 million years, until a second surge in diversification occurred about 40 million years before the present,” the authors detail.

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 fascinated him and that are now available for all scientists in the world to take advantage of to carry out research that leads them to understand how and why species diversify.

For Pérez-Escobar, who led the research in 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 for genetic improvement for crops. as well as better understand how they will react to pests and diseases. In addition, it is also expected that it will be possible to learn from the speciation patterns that allowed these plants to be so diverse, important information for their protection against the climate change.

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

This opens the possibility of, for example, being able to more effectively trace a route to search for chemical compounds with medicinal potential from those that have already been discovered so far. In fact, Kew is already using this information in a project in which, using artificial intelligencelook for plants that can help create new treatments against malaria

ALEJANDRA LÓPEZ PLAZAS
SCIENCE EDITING
@malelopezpl
@ScienceTime