Wang Jingli

wangjingli0715@163.com

SIGNIFICANT progress was recently achieved in research on the phylogenetic reconstruction of mosses, or the ordinal relationships of the moss tree of life.

The research was initiated by Liu Yang, a researcher with Fairy Lake Botanical Garden and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, and worked with other global research institutes including University of Connecticut, Duke University, Chicago Botanic Garden, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Swedish Museum of Natural History.

The research results are included in a thesis titled “Resolution of the ordinal phylogeny of mosses using targeted exons from organellar and nuclear genomes” that has been published in Nature (communications), the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal.

Mosses are a highly diverse lineage of land plants spanning at least 400 million years. Their diversification remains phylogentically ambiguous due to factors like the lack of fossils, making it difficult to build their “tree of life,” which is a model and research tool proposed by Charles Darwin to explore the evolution of life and describe the relationships between organisms.

Researchers overcame the difficulties by using targeted exons from the organellar and nuclear genomes of 142 species representing 29 of the 30 moss orders.

The results offers the most reliable and comprehensive hypotheses for the relationships and delineation of moss orders, while laying a solid foundation for the research on the biodiversity of mosses.

Fairylake Botanical Garden plays a leading role in the collection, cultivation, application and research of mosses in the country and is a global leader in building the moss tree of life.