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Research Group Cultivating Family Tree of Plant LifeGreen plants -- and the biologists who study their evolution -- are getting organized. The push is coming from a group of plant biologists, sponsored by a tri-agency (NSF/DOE/USDA) joint program, who want to help clean up the welter of different systems that scientists use for classifying and naming plants. In the process they hope to make the entire study of plants a bit more efficient. Green plants represent some of the amazing diversities that evolution has produced, says Machi Dilworth, director of NSF's integrated plant biology program. Life on earth as we know it could not exist without green plants. The Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group (GPPRCG) is helping scientists determine the correct arrangement of hundreds of species of green plants according to evolutionary history -- for example, connecting green algae with early land plants such as mosses, liverworts and hornworts. In the process of discovering the plants' proper places, GPPRCG expects to link the laboratories and research efforts of scientists across the United States and abroad. In addition, GPPRCG is coordinating data-gathering activities, facilitating the use of data bases for morphologic and molecular information, exploring new approaches to green plant phylogeny analysis, and finding new mechanisms to disseminate data to researchers, teachers and students. Benefits of the project include:
In the GPPRCG meetings held to date, plant biologists discussed how research topics should be chosen. So far, the consensus is clear: not the way they're chosen now. Very often, the selection of the plants to be studied is guided by the interests of the researcher and the local availability of samples. Thus, the best exemplar taxa are not always included in the study, says Dilworth. The need to get organized and set priorities is made more pressing, Dilworth notes, by recent advances in gene sequencing and the resulting avalanche of new information.
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