Pam and Doug Soltis, distinguished professors with the Florida Museum of Natural History, discuss how sequencing the genome of one critical flowering plant can be used as a tool to develop new pharmaceuticals and improve crop plants.
The Soltises are currently analyzing the genome of Amborella, unique as the sole survivor of an ancient evolutionary lineage that traces back to the last common ancestor of all flowering plants, which may help researchers understand the hereditary history of today’s highly modified crops.
Interview and videos produced by Peter Bryatt for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Pam Soltis: The concept of phylogeny or evolutionary history unites all living organisms into a single evolutionary system, and by understanding the evolutionary history we can use that phylogeny, or history, as a predictive tool to help us target our attempts to develop new pharmaceuticals, to help us understand resistance genes for crop plants, and to help us modify the plants that we do use in ways that make them more beneficial.
Amborella is only found on the island of New Caledonia, and New Caledonia is about a thousand miles off the northeast corner of Australia. New Caledonia is an amazing place biologically. It has tremendous diversity in all sorts of organisms, but the plant diversity in particular is astonishing. A huge proportion of the plants that occur there occur nowhere else in the world, and that’s exactly the situation with Amborella.
Doug Soltis: Amborella represents the closest relative, or the what we call the basal member, of all flowering plants. So as such it means it really is a representative of some of the earliest flowering plants and it’s our best chance to reconstruct some of the features. So from a practical standpoint that’s important because all of our crops are really flowering plants. We depend on them for so many things, but most of our crops are highly modified, so how do we learn more about the genomes for example of these. Well you you want to reconstruct, as best you can, the earliest one, and Amborella is the is the key to that.
So Amborella is really the equivalent in the flowering plant world of the duckbill platypus in the mammal world. So the duckbill platypus sits at the base of the mammal tree of life, and so that’s why it’s been very important to sequence its genome, and Amborella is important for the very same reason.
Learn more about the Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics Lab at the Florida Museum.