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Special for GG: Sex, gluttony and hoarding marked evolution of flowering plants
Given GG's current thesis on the nature of life, I thought he'd like to see this.
December 22, 2013
Sex, gluttony and hoarding marked evolution of flowering plants
By GEOFFREY MOHAN
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — Never mind the selfish gene — the cellular family history of the oldest living species of flowering plants is marked by enough sex and gluttony to earn a place in Shakespeare’s folio.
The powerhouse organelles inside cells of Amborella trichopoda, a woody shrub that grows only in the humid jungles of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, gobbled up and retained the entire genome from the equivalent organelles of four different species, three of moss and one of algae, according to a study of the plant’s mitochondrial DNA published this week in the journal Nature.
The results are the product of a years-long effort to sequence the full genome of the plant, a crucial step in solving what Charles Darwin once called “the abominable mystery” — the sudden flourishing long ago of several hundred thousand species of flowering plants.
An analysis of the nuclear DNA of the species, published in the same edition of Nature, revealed that the plant is the equivalent of the animal kingdom’s duck-billed platypus — a solitary sister left behind more than 100 million years ago by what became a panoply of flowering, or fruiting, plants.
The genome map...
Sex, gluttony and hoarding marked evolution of flowering plants
By GEOFFREY MOHAN
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — Never mind the selfish gene — the cellular family history of the oldest living species of flowering plants is marked by enough sex and gluttony to earn a place in Shakespeare’s folio.
The powerhouse organelles inside cells of Amborella trichopoda, a woody shrub that grows only in the humid jungles of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, gobbled up and retained the entire genome from the equivalent organelles of four different species, three of moss and one of algae, according to a study of the plant’s mitochondrial DNA published this week in the journal Nature.
The results are the product of a years-long effort to sequence the full genome of the plant, a crucial step in solving what Charles Darwin once called “the abominable mystery” — the sudden flourishing long ago of several hundred thousand species of flowering plants.
An analysis of the nuclear DNA of the species, published in the same edition of Nature, revealed that the plant is the equivalent of the animal kingdom’s duck-billed platypus — a solitary sister left behind more than 100 million years ago by what became a panoply of flowering, or fruiting, plants.
The genome map...
http://www.starbeacon.com/nationalnews/x1353068212/Sex-gluttony-and-hoarding-marked-evolution-of-flowering-plants