The onekp project  is an international transdisciplinary consortium made up of 200 top scientists from all over the world and led by Gane Wong (U. of Alberta), Jim Leebens-Mack (U. of Georgia), Mike Barker (U. of Arizona) among many others. The project has generated large-scale transcriptomes for over 1200 plants (from glaucocystophytes, red algae and green plants). The oneKP initiative has published landmark papers on plant evolution (Wicket et al., 2014, PNAS), horizontal gene transfer (Li, Villarreal et al. 2014, PNAS), among many others . This week we have published a capstone paper in Nature (including the cover coming out on Oct. 30).

The capstone paper provides new insight on phylogenetic relationships across the “green” tree of life and document the high number of whole genome duplications (except some green algae, some liverworts and Selaginella).

As expected gene families have expanded in the transition to land with high gene copy number in flowering plants.

This publication, we hope, will become a reference for botanists, evolutionary biologists, bioinformaticians, and the general public.

The Villarreal lab is quite happy to be part of this exciting initiative.

Enjoy the reading!