Seed plants are essential as a source of food, fuel, medicine, and more. Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has combined deep botanical knowledge with a powerful evolutionary genomic pipeline to decode and mine the DNA of non-flowering seed plants and uncover genes that evolved to help plants build seeds.
Seed plants are essential as a source of food, fuel, medicine, and more. Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has combined deep botanical knowledge with a powerful evolutionary genomic pipeline to decode and mine the DNA of non-flowering seed plants and uncover genes that evolved to help plants build seeds. These findings, published in Nature Communications, may aid scientists in improving seed crop production in agriculture and in the conservation of these ancient endangered seed plants.
In this study by members of the New York Plant Genomics Consortium—a multi-institutional collaboration of botanists, evolutionary and genomics scientists, and bioinformaticians—the researchers isolated and studied seed genes encoded in the genomes of the oldest living seed plants: gymnosperms. Gymnosperms, which include conifers and Ginkgo, bear “naked” seeds unprotected by a fruit and are one of the most threatened plant groups. Many gymnosperms are also “living fossils,” a term coined by Darwin, for their persistence on Earth since the age of the dinosaurs.
“Now that scientists can sequence any genome, the question becomes which species to sequence and why?” said Gloria Coruzzi, the Carroll & Milton Petrie Professor in NYU’s Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. “By studying gymnosperms—the species in which seeds first evolved, and which make up 30 percent of the world’s forests—we identified the genes supporting the evolution of seeds.”
Read more at: New York University
Sciadopitys verticillata (Japanese umbrella-pine), a living fossil gymnosperm species studied. (Photo Credit: Veronica Sondervan, NYU/NYBG)
