Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Volume 574 Issue 7780, 31 October 2019

Roots of diversity

The cover shows an example of the ‘entangled bank’ of interacting species that Darwin described in the conclusion of On the Origin of Species. Shown are ferns (Dryopteris intermedia) and mosses (Polytrichum commune and Thuidium delicatum), just three of nearly half-a-million species that make up the remarkable diversity of green plants. In this week’s issue, James Leebens-Mack, Gane Ka-Shu Wong and colleagues from the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes initiative report the vegetative transcriptomes of 1,124 species that span plant diversity, including green plants, glaucophytes and red algae. The authors construct a phylogenomic framework, which they use to infer the evolutionary relationships between species and to plot the timing of genomic changes and diversification events during the history of green plants. They find that large expansions of gene families preceded the origins of land plants and vascular plants, whereas whole-genome duplications seem to have occurred repeatedly throughout the evolution of flowering plants and ferns.

Cover image: Alaina R. Petlewski (Boyce Thompson Institute)

This Week

Top of page ⤴

News in Focus

Top of page ⤴

Books & Arts

Top of page ⤴

Opinion

Top of page ⤴

Work

Top of page ⤴

Research

Top of page ⤴

Collections

  • People with cancer of the prostate currently have numerous treatment options available to them. But one of the most established, a type of radiation therapy known as brachytherapy, seems to be falling out of favour with clinicians.

    Nature Outline
Top of page ⤴
Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Quick links