One of a kind…

These articles have been going long enough(!) to be able now to report a successful outcome to a research project whose initiation was announced in a former news item entitled ‘Old meets new’. The project is the elucidation of the genome of Amborella trichopoda. “Amborella is a monotypic genus of rare understory [sic! What ever happened to understorEy??? – Ed.] shrubs or small trees endemic to… New Caledonia”.

Not only is this plant rare and monotypic – truly ‘one of a kind’! – but it is also probably the living – extant – flowering plant [angiosperm] that is closest evolutionarily to the earliest true first member of the angiosperm plant group, and may therefore be “the last survivor of a lineage that branched off during the dynasty’s earliest days, before the rest of the 350,000 or so angiosperm species diversified”. Given Amborella’s exalted status (which “represents the equivalent of the duck-billed platypus in mammals”), it is hoped that understanding its genetics will shed light on the evolution of the angiosperms as a whole. Indeed, the University of Bonn’s Dietmar Quandt is reported as describing Amborella as a more worthy model organism than Arabidopsis(!!!).

Since the angiosperms are probably the most ‘successful’ of all the groups in the Plant Kingdom (‘the land plants’, the Plantae), hopes are understandably high that unravelling the genome of Amborella – reported by the aptly named Amborella Genome Project – will lead to the identification of “the molecular basis of biological innovations that contributed to their geologically near-instantaneous rise to ecological dominance”. And accompanying the main nuclear genome article, Danny Rice et al. report on Amborella’s mitochondrial genome (mitochondria have some of their own DNA additional to that located in the nucleus) and find that numerous genes were acquired by horizontal gene transfer from other plants, including almost four entire mitochondrial genomes from mosses and algae. So, as ancient as it is, Amborella was still prepared to ‘learn’ from the experiences of even older land plants – mosses – and plant-like algae (which are in a different kingdom entirely to the land plants, the Protista). Adopt and adapt: a life lesson for all living things, I suggest.

[For more on this fascinating story, visit the home of the Amborella genome database. And if you still need some ‘proper’ botany (after all this genomery), you need look no further than Paula Rudall and Emma Knowles’ paper examining ultrastructure of stomatal development in early-divergent angiosperms (including Amborella…).  Notwithstanding all of this understandable present-day excitement, I can’t help but think that the importance of Amborella was foretold many decades ago, as “popular-in-the-mid-1970s” British-based pop band Fox seemingly declared: “things can get much better, under your Amborella…”. Indeed! So, arabidopsis had better watch out! – Ed.]