Vast DNA tree of life for flowering plants revealed by global science team covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera

Amazing stuff! Impressive! What a gigantic effort!

"A new paper ... by an international team of 279 scientists led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew presents the most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life. 

Using 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera (ca. 60%), this incredible achievement sheds new light on the evolutionary history of flowering plants and their rise to ecological dominance on Earth. ...
Among the species sequenced for this study, more than 800 have never had their DNA sequenced before. ...
a huge stride towards building a tree of life for all 330,000 known species of flowering plants ...
The vast treasure troves of dried plant material in the world's herbarium collections, which comprise nearly 400 million scientific specimens of plants, can now be studied genetically. ...
511 of the species sequenced are already at risk of extinction, according to the IUCN Red List, including three more like Hesperelaea that are already extinct. ..."

From the abstract:

"Angiosperms are the cornerstone of most terrestrial ecosystems and human livelihoods. A robust understanding of angiosperm evolution is required to explain their rise to ecological dominance. So far, the angiosperm tree of life has been determined primarily by means of analyses of the plastid genome. Many studies have drawn on this foundational work, such as classification and first insights into angiosperm diversification since their Mesozoic origins. However, the limited and biased sampling of both taxa and genomes undermines confidence in the tree and its implications. Here, we build the tree of life for almost 8,000 (about 60%) angiosperm genera using a standardized set of 353 nuclear genes. This 15-fold increase in genus-level sampling relative to comparable nuclear studies provides a critical test of earlier results and brings notable change to key groups, especially in rosids, while substantiating many previously predicted relationships. Scaling this tree to time using 200 fossils, we discovered that early angiosperm evolution was characterized by high gene tree conflict and explosive diversification, giving rise to more than 80% of extant angiosperm orders. Steady diversification ensued through the remaining Mesozoic Era until rates resurged in the Cenozoic Era, concurrent with decreasing global temperatures and tightly linked with gene tree conflict. Taken together, our extensive sampling combined with advanced phylogenomic methods shows the deep history and full complexity in the evolution of a megadiverse clade."

Vast DNA tree of life for plants revealed by global science team using 1.8 billion letters of genetic code

Phylogenomics and the rise of the angiosperms (open access)

Fig. 1: Time-calibrated phylogenetic tree for angiosperms based on 353 nuclear genes.

Fig. 2: Diversification dynamics across angiosperms.