Researchers unveil comprehensive flowering plant tree of life, bearing fruit for medicine and conservation research

Scientists unite from across the globe, aligning fossil evidence with extensive genetic data to piece together the flowering plant tree of life.

Flowering plants
Flowering plants dominate Earth, comprising 90% of plant life.


An international team of scientists have combined their knowledge, expertise, and passion, to bring forward the most up-to-date evolutionary tree for flowering plants to the scientific community. This highly successful group of plants (also known as angiosperms) are said to comprise as much as 90% of documented plant life on Earth.

The research sheds light on the relationships between plant genera, the evolutionary history of flowering plants and their dominance on planet Earth, aids the identification of new species, and provides a strong base from which to detect and isolate new medicinal chemical compounds.

An overview

The 279 researchers analyzed a genetic code of 1.8 billion letters from more than 9,500 species of flowering plant. The trail-blazing, cross-cultural team included individuals from 138 organizations across 27 countries. This study is the most comprehensive of its kind to date and is set to ignite further research and innovation in the areas of sustainable agriculture, species conservation, and medicine.

“Efforts like this show how the international scientific community can come together to collaborate and produce something that no one research group or institution can do alone,” said study co-author and curator of the Institute of Systematic Botany, Dr. Fabián Michelangeli, from the New York Botanical Garden, USA.

Genetic sequence
Researchers analysed the genetic code of 9,500 species of flowering plants to create a detailed tree of life.

Dr. Michelangeli’s expertise concerning tropical flowering plants from the Melastomataceae family, along with added expertise from collaborating authors, aided in the identification and selection of flowering plant samples for the study. Director and Curator of NYBG’s Cullman Program for Molecular Systematics, Dr. Gregory M. Plunkett, provided expertise on plant families: Apiaceae (parsley or carrot) and Araliaceae (ginseng).

Among the thousands of flowering plant species included in this study, the genomes of over 800 of them had not been sequenced before.

Combining genetic analysis with fossil evidence

The researchers married their genetic findings to fossil evidence of flowering plants to create a flowering plant tree of life that could provide insights in their evolutionary success.

Across 9,500 plant species that were sequenced, 3,400 were retrieved from 163 herbaria in 48 countries. Other samples were derived from living collections, DNA banks, and seeds. Data for more than 1,900 species were available through public accessible repositories.

Some notable herbarium specimens that contributed to the study’s magnum opus include the a sandwort (Arenaria globiflora) collected in Nepal almost 200 years ago and the Guadalupe Island olive (Hesperelaea palmeri), which has been recorded as extinct since 1875. A total of 511 of the species that were sequenced are deemed at risk of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List.

The researchers analyzed 200 fossils, aligning geological time with genetic changes in flowering plants to map the trajectory of their diversification. According to their research, early flowering plants saw a spectacular explosion in richness that gave rise to more than 80 percent of the major lineages of today immediately after they appeared. But during the next 100 million years, this sudden expansion eased, and about 40 million years ago, it saw another revival. It is interesting to note that this second round of diversification coincides with a period of declining global temperatures.

Climate and conservation

The findings of the present study broaden our knowledge of flowering plant evolution and have important ramifications for current research on climate change and plant conservation.

It is possible to forecast the effects of ongoing climatic shifts on plant biodiversity and influence conservation plans by having a thorough understanding of previous cycles of plant diversification and the way they relate to climatic changes.

The research team was led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the study’s important work was published in the journal, Nature.