I am very much looking forward to these papers:
In two papers set to be published next week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists report that the two largest groups of flowering plants are more closely related to each other than any of the other major lineages. These are the monocots, which include grasses and their relatives, and the eudicots, which include sunflowers and tomatoes.Doug and Pam Soltis, a UF professor of botany and curator at UF’s Florida Museum of Natural History, respectively, also showed that a stunning diversification of flowering plants they are referring to as the “Big Bang” took place in the comparatively short period of less than 5 million years — and resulted in all five major lineages of flowering plants that exist today.”Flowering plants today comprise around 400,000 species,” said Pam Soltis. “So to think that the burst that give rise to almost all of these plants occurred in less than 5 million years is pretty amazing — especially when you consider that flowering plants as a group have been around for at least 130 million years.”[source]
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Which would explain why it’s so easy to hybridize vegetables without resorting to frankenfood methods.
Me too, but we’re probably going to have to wait a week because it’s PNAS.On the surface the work looks sound because they used complete chloroplast genomes. I doesn’t sound like they’ve discovered anything new but, instead, have provided more solid evidence for what we thought we knew already.Race you …..?
Larry: It’s out now. I’m currently backed up on peer-reviewed stuff, with a paper on genetics (which you will love) and the roots thing in line ahead of plant evolution. So you may go first!