Plant & Animal Genomes XIV Conference

January 14-18, 2006
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

The Floral Genome Project

Claude W. dePamphilis¹ , Hong Ma¹ , Doug Soltis² , Pam Soltis² , James H. Leebens-Mack¹ , David Oppenheimer² , John Carlson¹ , William Farmerie² , Michael Frohlich⁵ , Laura Zahn¹ , Sangtae Kim² , Matyas Buzgo² , Naomi Altman¹ , Patrick Zheng² , Andre Chanderbali² , P. Kerr Wall¹ , Liying Cui¹ , Teri Solow³ , Lukas Mueller³ , Victor Albert⁴ , Jeff Doyle³ , Ali Barakat¹ , Lena Landherr¹

¹  Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA

²  University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

³  Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

⁴  University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

⁵  The Natural History Museum, London, England

Variations in floral structure are of major evolutionary and economic importance, impacting various plant processes such as pollination and gene flow, fruit production, and seed dispersal. Despite the central importance of the flower in plant biology, and huge strides made in understanding the molecular genetic basis of flower development in a growing number of model species, many fundamental questions concerning the origin and diversification of flowers remain. The Floral Genome Project
( http://www.floralgenome.org) is investigating floral diversification using an "Evolutionary Genomic" approach involving 'exemplars' for basal angiosperm groups (Amborella, water-lilies, magnoliids including tulip poplar and avocado, ranunculids, and ancient monocot lineages) where most flower diversity is found, and gymnosperm outgroups. To date, over 100,000 ESTs have been generated from cDNA libraries derived from reproductive organs in these species ( http://pgn.cornell.edu/ ). Analyses of gene families involved in the regulation of flower development implicate gene duplication and shifting gene expression as important processes in floral evolution. Further, the concomitant timing of duplication events inferred from many gene family phylogenies confirm the importance of polyploidy in angiosperm evolution.