Collaborative Research: Building a Comprehensive Evolutionary History of Flagellate Plants

在陆地植物生命的最初3亿年里，地球的植物区系完全由鞭毛植物组成，今天包括大约30,000种苔藓植物、石蕊植物、蕨类植物和裸子植物。许多重大创新，包括气孔、维管组织、根和叶、木本茎和种子，最先在鞭毛植物祖先中进化。鞭毛植物不仅为这些关键特征的早期进化提供了一个窗口，而且今天以充满活力和多样化的谱系为代表，这些谱系对全球生态做出了重大贡献，特别是通过对全球碳和氮循环的贡献，并为生物多样性提供了关键的栖息地。这项研究项目将分析18,000种现有鞭毛植物物种的分子遗传变异，以创建整个种群的物种水平系统发育(物种关系进化树)。生成的系统发育树将与化石数据、植物特征的全面数据集以及地球上物种出现的现有数据相关联。这个项目的结果将为研究开花植物特征的起源提供信息，并为学生培训和外展提供平台。该项目将通过使用新的测序技术检查500个核基因座来提高我们对鞭毛植物的历史和关系的理解，并产生与大量和不同的化石、表型特征和地理空间分布数据相关联的物种水平的系统发育图。表型数据集将利用一种自然语言处理工具，该工具将得到加强和测试，以处理大型数据集，地理空间数据将允许探索世界范围内的多样性和地方性模式。所有数据将完全整合到正在进行的项目中，如开放生命树和下一代表现学。教育专家将开发一个在线教育工具，培训下一代生物多样性科学家，为在大学课堂上使用项目数据提供一个可访问的框架，同时促进循证教学做法。微型植物公民科学项目将通过博物馆和学校在普通公众中促进科学素养和植物意识。

For the first ~300 million years of plant life on land, Earth's flora consisted entirely of flagellate plants, which today include approximately 30,000 species of bryophytes, lycophytes, ferns, and gymnosperms. Numerous major innovations, including stomata, vascular tissue, roots and leaves, woody stems, and seeds, evolved first in flagellate plant ancestors. The flagellate plants not only provide a window to the early evolution of these critical features, but are represented today by vibrant and diverse lineages that contribute substantially to global ecology, particularly via contributions to global carbon and nitrogen cycles and offering critical habitats for biodiversity. This research project will analyze molecular genetic variation among the 18,000 available flagellate plant species in order to create a species-level phylogeny (evolutionary tree of species relationships) for the entire group. Phylogenetic trees generated will be linked to fossil data, a comprehensive dataset of plant traits, and available data on species occurrence on the planet. The results of this project will inform investigations into the origins of features characteristic of flowering plants and provide a platform for student training and outreach.This project will improve our understanding of the history and relationships of the flagellate plants by using new sequencing technologies to examine 500 nuclear loci and to produce a species-level phylogeny for these taxa that is linked to and integrated with an immense and varied amount of data on fossils, phenomic characters, and geospatial distributions. Phenotypic datasets will utilize a natural language processing tool which will be enhanced and tested to handle large datasets and the geospatial data will allow exploration of world-wide patterns of diversity and endemism. All data will be fully integrated into ongoing projects such as Open Tree of Life and Next Generation Phenomics. Education experts will develop an online educational tool for training the next generation of biodiversity scientists by providing an accessible framework for using the project data in university classrooms while promoting evidence-based teaching practices. A MicroPlants citizen science project will promote scientific literacy and plant awareness in the general public, through museums and schools.