Plants with double genomes might have had a better chance to survive the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event

Most flowering plants have been shown to be ancient polyploids that have undergone one or more whole genome duplications early in their evolution. Furthermore, many different plant lineages seem to have experienced an additional, more recent genome duplication. Starting from paralogous genes lying in duplicated segments or identified in large expressed sequence tag collections, we dated these youngest duplication events through penalized likelihood phylogenetic tree inference. We show that a majority of these independent genome duplications are clustered in time and seem to coincide with the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) boundary. The KT extinction event is the most recent mass extinction caused by one or more…

• EC
  European Commission

  Awards: FOOD-CT-2006-016214, EU-FP6
• BF
  Belgian Federal Science Policy Office

  Award: IUAP P6/25
• FW
  Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
• VR
  Vlaamse regering