News
A five-year effort to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships
among all green plants has resulted in the most complete "tree
of life" of any group of living things on the planet, including
animals.
The up-to-date family tree has revealed several surprises
about the evolution of green plants, such as how they emerged
from the sea onto land and how they are related to the four
other major kingdoms: the brown plants, the red plants,
the fungi and the animals.
Specifically, the team has overturned the traditional
belief that the so-called "land-plant invasion" was led
by seawater plants. Instead, the research team has found
that primitive freshwater plants provided the ancestral
stock from which all green plants now on land are descended,
and that this ancestor spawned every green plant now alive
on earth.
This knowledge will help scientists in a broad range of
disciplines, from those trying to develop new and better crops
to those prospecting for new medicines.
(exerpt from University of California press release)
A sampling of coverage of "Deep
Green" by the media
-
- Science
Magazine June 13th, 2003 (archived)
- Thus for plant taxonomists the next 5 years promise to
be a data gold rush. Several other projects, independently
funded but interconnected, are delving into less well- covered
aspects of the field. One, called Deep Gene, will help plant
experts make use of plant genomics information and vice
versa...
-
- Tree
of Life Grant
- A new
grant will fund research to help reconstruct the evolutionary
relationships of green plants using comparative genomics.
This research is part of a nation-wide
collaborative effort involving 6 universities. Through
its new "Assembling
the Tree of Life" program, the National Science
Foundation is hoping to stimulate a detailed reconstruction
of the phylogeny of all living things, to better understand
the history of life and advance human needs including discovery
of new drugs, tracking pathogens, and conservation of biodiversity.
For more details see brochure
online (warning, a 2.5M PDF file).
-
- National
Geographic June 4th, 2001
- A news brief about the evolution of all multicellular
land plants from only one lineage of algae, even though
three other algal lineages made the transition from water
to land. Commentary by UC Berkeley's Brent Mishler and Louisiana
State's Russell Chapman.
- The
Advocate ONLINE May 29, 2001 s
- Article on Cephaleuros, Magnolias, and Deep
Green/Deep Gene by Marlene Naanes
-
The Scientist 15[5]:12, Mar. 5, 2001
- An overview of Deep Green results
- UNISCI
- International Science News February 19, 2001
- "The highly successful Deep Green project to construct
a "tree of life" for the green plants has ended,
but it has seeded new projects to strengthen the branches
and root the tree more firmly in new genetic and fossil
data.
-
Science NOW 19 February 2001 7:00 PM
- Deep Green at the San Francisco meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science
- Academic
Press Daily Inscight February 2, 2001
- "By finding that ferns and horsetails are more closely
related to each other than to seed plants, Pryer and colleagues
have "added a new branch to the tree," says Brent
Mishler of the University of California, Berkeley"
- Financial
Times March 3, 2001
- A report in the Financial Times of London about Deep
Green at the 2001 AAAS meeting in San Francisco
- UC
Berkeley Press Release February 16, 2001
- Deep Green spawns Deep Gene and Deep Time... by Robert
Sanders
- NSF
News January 31, 2001
- Scientists Shake Up "Family Tree" of Green Plants
- BEN
- A report in the Botanical Electronic News on Deep Green
at the Portland meetings
- Boston Globe
- A May 28, 2000 report on Deep Green and botanical nomenclature
- California
Wild
- In the Winter 2000 issue, Jerold Lowenstein discusses
Welwitschia and Deep Green.
- The
Why Files: Science Behind the News: Tree of Life, 1999
- "Homologies, notes Brent Mishler, a professor of
integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley,
can arise in anatomical structures, such as the three-part
body of the insect, or in the "lettering" of the
genetic code"
- Discover
Magazine
- The year in science
- San Jose Mercury
News
- Emphasis on "rankless classification"
- "Quirks
& Quarks," Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
- Download or listen to radio interview with Brent Mishler
- Botany
at About.Com
- Story on Deep Green; review of principles of cladistics
- Botany
at About.Com
- Interview with Brent Mishler (external link)
- New York Times
- National Public Radio
interview
- UC Berkeley News
Release
- Science Magazine
- University Science
- Science Daily
- The Washington
Post
- ABC News
- San Francisco
Chronicle
- Oakland Tribune
- Wired.com
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