Untangling the roots of plant genomes: Supporting a “moonshot” for botany

Research featured this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights the progress of plant genomics and includes a roadmap for the enormous task of sequencing the genomes of plants worldwide.

The article, “Green Plant Genomes: What We Know in an Era of Rapidly Expanding Opportunities” underscores the significance of this massive endeavor. “Nearly half a million species of plants inhabit the Earth today and the secrets to understanding nearly everything about them is hidden in the sequences of their DNA (the plant genome),” said Dr. W. John Kress, senior author of the paper and Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian. “Plants are the foundation of environments across the planet and deciphering their genomes will be a game changer for understanding nearly all aspects of our own lives, from improving foods and medicines to inspiring artists and enhancing ecosystem stability.”

The effort required to sequence plant genomes is no small task, but it is the goal of the Earth BioGenome Project, “a ‘moonshot’ for biology, [that] aims to sequence, catalog, and characterize the genomes of all of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity [including plants, animals, and fungi] over a period of ten years.” The article, one of ten published this week in a Special Feature in PNAS, is co-authored by an international group of plant scientists and outlines a map that will help researchers worldwide achieve this ambitious goal.

An organism’s genome contains all the instructions necessary to carry out the processes of life and it should come as no surprise that genomes are extremely complex. Sequencing and assembling whole genomes will allow researchers to understand how species are related to and have evolved from other species; how they perform essential biological functions; and how they interact with and respond to their environments. Sequencing whole plant genomes is especially complicated compared with other groups of organisms for several reasons, but largely because there are so many species of plants and they have highly variable and often extremely complex genomes.

Consider that as of today’s date, there are just 883 whole genome sequences available for green plants compared with 2,019 whole genome sequences available for vertebrates; yet there are more than 400,000 species of green plants compared with just 73,340 species of vertebrates. The variation in genome size among plants is also astounding – some plants have a genome as small as just 65,000 individual nucleotides (the molecules that make up the four ‘base pairs’ in the genetic code) and as large as nearly 150 billion nucleotides. There is incredible complexity involved with understanding plant genomes.

Untangling this complexity is at the root of this article. The authors present a roadmap that will help the global scientific community collect samples using new partnerships such as the Global Genome Initiative for Gardens and Global Genome Biodiversity Network as well as the latest advances in software and technology that will help researchers sequence and assemble highly complex plant genomes. With this new perspective, botanists will be able to advance plant genome sequencing like never before.

Citation:

Title: Green Plant Genomes: What We Know in an Era of Rapidly Expanding Opportunities
Volume X, Issue Y, Pages Z-Z
https://www.pnas.org/content/119/4/e2115640118?cct=2546

W. John Kress^1,2,3,*, Douglas E. Soltis^4,5,6, Paul J. Kersey⁷, Jill L. Wegrzyn⁸, James H. Leebens-Mack⁹, Morgan R. Gostel¹⁰, Xin Liu¹¹, and Pamela S. Soltis^4,5

¹National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013-7012, USA. ²Department of Biological Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA. ³The Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University, Boston, MA 02130, USA. ⁴Florida Museum of Natural History, ⁵Biodiversity Institute, and ⁶Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA.  ⁷Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3AE, UK. ⁸Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Institute for Systems Genomics: Computational Biology Core, University of Connecticut, Storrs CT 06269-3214, USA. ⁹Department of Plant Biology, 2101 Miller Plant Sciences, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602-7271, USA. ¹⁰Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT), Fort Worth, TX 76107-3400, USA. ¹¹China National GeneBank, BGI-Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China.  

*Corresponding author: W. John Kress

See also:
Earth BioGenome Project Begins Genome Sequencing in Earnest: 3,000 Genomes Expected to Be Sequenced by End of 2022

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About Fort Worth Botanic Garden | Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT^®)

The Fort Worth Botanic Garden (FWBG) is the oldest public botanic garden in Texas with beautiful theme gardens, including the Fuller Garden, Rose Garden, Japanese Garden, and the Victor and Cleyone Tinsley Garden, which features plants native to north central Texas. The Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT^®) is a nonprofit, international research, education and conservation organization that collects and safeguards plant specimens, studies and protects living plants, and teaches about the importance of conservation and biodiversity to the world. BRIT assumed nonprofit management of the Fort Worth Botanic Garden Oct. 1, 2020. The combined organization comprises 120 acres in Fort Worth’s Cultural District two miles west of downtown Fort Worth at 3220 Botanic Garden Blvd., Fort Worth, Texas 76107. Winter Hours: Monday-Sunday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.  Parking is free throughout the campus during regular business hours.

About GGI-Gardens
Established in 2015, GGI-Gardens is an international partnership of botanical gardens and arboreta with nearly 50 partners from six continents focused on collection herbarium vouchers from living collections and preserving their genome resources in biobanks. Data from these collections is made publicly available and shared through scientific networks such as the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) to facilitate genomic research. To date, GGI-Gardens has supported the collection of nearly half of the genera of vascular plants on Earth.