Amborella trichopodaWIKIPEDIA, SCOTT ZONAThere is nothing outwardly special about Amborella trichopoda—a small, shrubby, understory tree with unremarkable creamy flowers from the Pacific islands of New Caledonia. But its DNA reveals its true significance: A. trichopoda is the sister species of all other flowering plants, or angiosperms. It is the last survivor of a lineage that branched off during the dynasty’s earliest days, before the rest of the 350,000 or so angiosperm species diversified.
A large consortium of scientists has now sequenced Amborella’s genome to understand what the ancestral angiosperms were like, and how they came to fill the world with flowers. The results are published today (December 19) in a series of papers in Science.
“The traits that Amborella shares with the other angiosperms can be interpreted as primitive traits that were present in their shared ancestor,” said Claude dePamphilis from Pennsylvania State University, one of the project’s leaders. “Now that we have Amborella’s genome, we can infer those traits and get the first real insights into what that common ancestor was like, genetically.”
Dietmar Quandt from the University of Bonn, who was not involved in the study, described Amborella as a more worthy model organism than Arabidopsis—the ...
