The riddle of the origin of flowers

The researchers think that it is close in its properties to the plants with the first flowers on earth, so they made an effort and recently succeeded in deciphering the structure of the genome - the hereditary material of the Amborella.

Author: Zvi Atzmon, young Galileo

The flowering plants are not only beautiful and joyful, but also of enormous importance: they are the most important food producers for humans - even plants whose flowers are not large and spectacular, such as the potato and tomato flowers, or even very humble, such as the wheat, barley and rice flowers.

Flowering plants are of interest to plant researchers (botanists) because they pose a very intriguing puzzle, one that also troubled Charles Darwin, who is considered the father of the theory of evolution: who were the ancestors of the approximately 300 species of flowering plants known today? One rare plant is of great importance to botanists: it is a Hamborella bush that grows on an island in the Pacific Ocean.

The researchers think that it is close in its properties to the plants with the first flowers on earth, so they made an effort and recently succeeded in deciphering the structure of the genome - the hereditary material of the Amborella. The researchers believe that the flower plants developed following the duplication of the genome of an earlier plant. As a result of the multiplication, many genes could change and create new features, including the creation of the parts of the flower. Thus, following the multiplication, many species of flowering plants were created in a relatively short time. According to the researchers, the duplication of the genome took place about two hundred million years ago.

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see also: Decoding the genome of a tropical plant made it possible to understand how the flowering plants were created