The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. - Charles Darwin
The tree of life is used to explain the evolution of relationships between the different species on Earth.
In 2015 scientists released a first draft of a new "tree of life," demonstrating how the world's 2.3 million species of animals plants, fungi and microbes are connected. The project, a collaborative effort among eleven institutions, supported by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation was published online September 18, 2015 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.
On April 24 of this year, the most comprehensive "tree of life" to date for flowering plants was presented in a new study published in Nature by an international team of 279 scientists. Using 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera this achievement sheds new light on the evolutionary history of flowering plants and their rise to ecological dominance on Earth. The open access article is titled “Phylogenomics and the Rise of the Angiosperms”. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07324-0
The flowering plant tree of life
Plants that fruit or flower are called angiosperms and account for about 90% of all known plant life on land. The most numerous of all the divisions in the Plant Kingdom, they are found virtually everywhere on the planet. In comparison, gymnosperms are flowerless plants that produce cones and seeds. Gymnosperms include the conifers, cycads, and ginkgo.
Flowering plants emerged over 140 million years ago, after which they rapidly overtook other vascular plants. Darwin was puzzled by the seemingly sudden appearance of such diversity in the fossil record and wrote: "The rapid development, as far as we can judge, of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery." The question of how flowering plants were able to develop this dominance has occupied researchers to this day. This study sheds insights into their origins and relationships. Besides well-known plant types found on Earth today they also examined the genetic codes of centuries-old specimens and already extinct examples. Herbariums conserve plants and plant parts for scientific purposes in dried or pressed form. The DNA of these dried plants can be isolated and used for analysis. Seed banks, where seeds are stored to preserve genetic diversity for the future, are also important to the research work - centuries-old seeds can be germinated and studied.
The research team, led by scientisits at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK, believes the data will contribute to identify new species, refine plant classification, uncover new medicinal compounds, and conserve plants in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss. Scientists who collaborated on the project noted, “The sheer amount of data unlocked by this research, which would take a single computer 18 years to process, is a huge stride towards building a tree of life for all 330,000 known species of flowering plants—a massive undertaking by Kew's Tree of Life Initiative. Open access will also help scientists make the most of the data, such as combining it with artificial intelligence to predict which plant species may contain molecules with medicinal potential. Similarly, the tree of life can be used to better understand and predict how pests and diseases will affect plants in the future. Ultimately, the researchers note, the applications of this data will be driven by the ingenuity of the scientists who access it.”