journey through the life of plants

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Both baffling and astounding, ‘Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants’ found Stevie Wonder branching out into soundtrack work for the first time.

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Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants was issued as a double-album soundtrack on October 30, 1979. And while “What is this ?” may be a perfectly valid question in some cases, it wasn’t appropriate here. A far more pertinent inquiry would have been: “Hang on a minute. How can a guy who cannot see, write music for a movie, a predominantly visual medium?” Think about it for a moment. The answer, of course, is: this is Stevie Wonder. What can’t he do?

Listen to Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants on Apple Music and Spotify .

An anomaly among Stevie Wonder albums

Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants was Wonder’s first new album for the best part of three years. He hadn’t intended it as “the new Stevie Wonder album” as such, more as a soundtrack he’d created for the documentary of the same name, but Motown, hungry for fresh material from its confirmed musical genius, pretty much marketed it as a new Stevie opus.

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That triggered a certain amount of confusion: where was this record’s “Superstition,” “Sir Duke” or “Creepin’”? Well, there was a hit, a US No. 4, in “Send One Your Love,” while two further singles were drawn from the collection. The album sold well at first – fans were as hungry for Stevie material as his record company was – but clearly it was no Fulfillingness’ First Finale . Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants remains an anomaly in Wonder’s 70s catalog: a little-visited cranny in his highly original musiquarium, full of lengthy instrumentals; but it has its highlights – and some are very high.

The recording of Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants

To answer the big question: Stevie had the producer describe what was happening on screen, scene by scene, as a rough cut of the movie played, while the Motown genius worked on composing the music, and the engineer, Gary Olazabal, assisted with defining the length of each piece. Simple, when you’re Stevie Wonder.

Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants

Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants starts slowly; you’re immediately aware that it’s going to be high on soundscapes and mood, and low on funk. A lot of it, such as “Voyage To India,” is essentially classical in tone – in this instance, both Western and the classical music of the subcontinent. There’s low-key mystery in “Earth’s Creation” and the tinkling “The First Garden” opens like a horror movie theme . If you’re looking for a reference point within African-American music, it would be Miles Davis ’ “Then There Were None,” before the piece warms up with harmonica: a hint that more regular Stevie-ish music was to come? For sure, as the vocal track “Same Old Story” arrives, with its melody like a samba bringing out Stevie’s more soulful side for the first time here.

“Venus Flytrap And The Bug” offers a touch of “Peter And The Wolf,” though more like the Jimmy Smith version than an orchestral one, slipping along as twilight jazz, with Stevie buggin’ vocally like like a Disney cartoon villain. “Ai No Sono” uses synth-like sedate harpsichord music, with chanting children adding to its Japanese vibe. Then comes a bomb in “Power Flower,” co-written with Michael Sembello and delivering a feel that would have fitted Songs In the Key Of Life . A magnificent slow jam with touching harmonica and a glorious rumble in the bottom end, this is one of the high points for those seeking the flavor of the standard 70s Stevie.

Another thriller arrives with “Race Babbling,” an uptempo tune a tickle or two ahead of its time, with superb hurtling basslines and mad vocoder suggestive of early electro, 80s Herbie Hancock, and, inevitably, Kraftwerk – though its sense of a free flow was rare in the electronic music of that era. The hit “Send One Your Love” is a lovely Stevie ballad, but, as is often the case on … The Secret Life Of Plants , it lacks a hint of funk in the bottom end. “Outside My Window” has a similar issue for fans of standard Stevie: it has that lovely rolling feel of “Isn’t She Lovely,” but you’re waiting for a tougher drum beat to kick it along harder.

Glowing with warmth, “Black Orchid” is another little miracle befitting Stevie’s “classic” albums (the lyric is laden with more than just horticultural matters). The whimsical ballad “Come Back As A Flower” also has shades of early-70s Stevie; sung by Syreeta, it would have passed muster perfectly on her second album. And once you’re used to the absence of definite grooves, it comes as a bit of a surprise when the driving “A Seed’s A Star’/“Tree Medley’ delivers grooves by the trug-load, offering echoes of the funk-Latin vibe of “Another Star.” “Finale” reveals further dancefloor vibes with chugging synth and hissing drum machine beats.

The reception and legacy of Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants

Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants is an exceptionally long suite of often lengthy mood pieces in which “songs” are few and far between, and grooves in the funky sense rarely crop up. But there is beauty here. Stevie’s unquenchable desire for experimentation and love for melody are in full effect, and some of the magic and mystery of the botanic planet is evoked.

Stevie’s obsession with electronics allied to the sort of jazzy chords he favored are in evidence throughout; this could not be the work of anyone else. It’s a soundtrack, not really a Stevie Wonder album, but the fact that there’s a sprinkling of songs worthy of Stevie’s classic albums amid the scene-setting sounds is a bonus. It may be a curiosity, but the album’s very existence was some kind of wonder in itself, and the love and almost obsessional nurture that went into it sing out of every track.

Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants can be bought here .

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Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants

By Andy Beta

Pop/R&B

August 4, 2019

A journalist might have found themselves one autumn morning in 1976 eating a luxurious breakfast at Essex House before boarding a private jet to a farmhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts, to have a first-listen to Stevie Wonder’s masterpiece, Songs in the Key of Life . Wonder himself introduced the album, decked out in a cream-colored cowboy suit and hat, with a leather gun belt whose holsters were festooned with the cover art and the message “#1 WITH A BULLET.” Universally beloved, it shipped gold, entered the charts at No. 1, and stayed there until January of 1977.

When a journalist could next chat with Wonder, it was nearly three years later. They could just take the 2 train uptown to the New York Botanical Garden, where critics were instead served vegetarian fare as they listened to another double album, the follow-up to his magnum opus. Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants was years in the making, a soundtrack based on Walon Green’s documentary based on the bestselling book about how plants can be lie-detector tests, how the fern in your house reacts to your emotions, and how mustard seeds can communicate with distant galaxies.

October 1979 was a particularly auspicious month for double albums like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and the Who’s Quadrophenia soundtrack (Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Clash’s London Calling would soon follow). Secret Life of Plants entered at No. 4 on the album charts its first week but quickly plummeted. After Wonder collected 12 Grammys in a four-year span, Secret Life of Plants only garnered one measly nomination. An incredibly ambitious tour—boasting over 60 musicians, singers, sound crew, staff, a computer to synchronize his synthesizers, a screen projecting scenes from the film, and a recording truck—hemorrhaged money and was truncated to six dates. Stevie couldn’t even sell out his hometown of Detroit.

Motown Record executives and fans alike did not know where to begin this Journey and critics were merciless. “May Be His Worst Yet,” read one headline. “More than being awful pieces of music, [they] reek of automation and transmit no sincerity,” went a review. Rolling Stone likened it to Karo syrup and called it “a strange succession of stunted songs, nattering ballads and wandering instrumentals,” while Robert Christgau equated it to “[an] anonymous Hollywood hack at their worst...ardently schmaltzy instead of depressingly schlocky.” The Village Voice equated it to “the painful awkwardness of a barely literate sidewalk sermon.”

It’s a reversal of fortune without equal in pop music. In nearly any appreciation of Stevie Wonder’s profound run of music, Secret Life of Plants serves as a page break, a bookend, the arid valley after the vertiginous peak of the beloved Songs in the Key of Life . In almost every assessment, it marks the end of the greatest run in pop music history. “If Alexander wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer,” critic Jack Hamilton said when Slate ran their “ Wonder Week ” feature, “Stevie happily composed 90 minutes of largely instrumental music for the soundtrack to a documentary about botany.”

Favoring slowness as well as quicksilver mood shifts, spare balladry and additive composition, acoustic guitars and two $40,000 Yamaha GX-1 synthesizers, whimsical experimentation and near invisible incremental movement, an album with six credits for “special programming of synthesizer” and Wonder with almost all other instrumentation, it’s a flummoxing and charming album wherein Wonder sings about seeds, leaves, and ecology as he himself embodies the traits of his botanical muse. The best insight into Plants may lie in the original Times review, where, in the midst of meditating on self-indulgence and Wonder’s sentimental mysticism, John Rockwell notes: “He has also managed to make an album that in its own idiosyncratic way may seem an oasis of peace and calm amid the bustle of the rest of the pop-music business.”

When Wonder accepted the challenge of providing a soundtrack for the documentary, even he was surprised: “I’d always figured if I did one it would be for a film that raised society’s consciousness about black people.” Originally, the film was to use a soundtrack made in part from plants with Wonder contributing “Tree” for the end of the picture. It didn’t fit with the rest of the film, but producer Michael Braun asked Wonder to instead score the entire film. So Wonder would go in with a four-track recorder and headphones. In the left channel was Braun explaining what was happening on-screen while engineer Gary Olazbal would count down the number of frames in the sequence in his right, leaving Wonder to sketch out the score.

Six studios would ultimately be used. It was only the second album to ever be recorded digitally (Ry Cooder’s Bop Til You Drop beat it by a few months) and the first album to use a sampler in the form of the rudimentary Computer Music Melodian, which perhaps explains the special thanks given to the air traffic controllers at Dallas-Fort Worth airport and the Los Angeles Zoo.

Its scope is difficult to convey, not just because a blind musician provided a soundtrack for a film that he himself could not see. Wonder probably saw about as much of the film as the general populace did, as The Secret Life of Plants never got a wide release in theaters and was never put out on VHS, DVD, or made available on streaming services. The opening movement of “Earth’s Creation” is ludicrously bombastic all on its own, full of Phantom of the Opera -style high-frequency shredding and chord-bludgeoning. With the film though, it pairs perfectly with intensely dramatic images of spuming lava, crashing tsunami waves, flapping seaweed, and dancing plankton. The first side of the album remains wildly uneven, but how else to convey the Godlike act of creation without being by turns chaotic, messy, lovely, whimsical, and a little cruel?

“The First Garden”—with its lullaby chimes, sampled bird songs and crickets, acoustic bass, and harmonica line (all played by Wonder)—provides the underlying motif of The Secret Life of Plants and it works magically with the time-lapse images of sprouting acorns, spores, and new shoots. And while “Voyage to India” might seem willfully exotic on the album, mixing together themes that appear later into an array of wineglass drones, symphonic strings, and sitar, it works with the film and its introduction of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, the Indian polymath and botanist. Later on, Wonder folds in a Japanese children’s choir and a crackling duo of African kora and djembe drum.

It’s nearly 15 minutes into the album before Stevie Wonder’s voice appears, telling the story of both Bose and George Washington Carver on the plaintive “Same Old Story.” It scans as the first of many songs overtly about plants, as well as one of Wonder’s most forced biographical efforts. But the stories of Bose and Carver are far more painful than that. Bose was an Indian subject of the Queen, his work discovering the electrical nature of plants largely ignored by the Royal Society in London during his time. Across the ocean, the slave-born botanist Carver struggled most of his life to rise to the descriptor of “ Black Leonardo .” But as brown- and black-skinned men—“Born of slaves who died,” as Wonder puts it—their genius was discounted and dismissed outright in white society. There’s a tactile resignation in the chorus: “It’s that same old story again.”

In exploring the neglected, ignored, seemingly inhuman aspects that society affixes to the plant kingdom, Wonder finds resonance between his botanical subject matter and the black experience. “A Seed’s a Star” states in its first line: “We’re a people black as is your night/Born to spread Amma’s eternal light.” Reaching back to the Dogon tribe of Africa and their worship of the distant star Sirius B, also referred to as “Po Tolo,” that name in their language signifies at once the immensity of that heavenly body as well as the smallest seed, a paradox that encompasses the interconnectedness of all life.

Stevie introduces many voices other than his own. Children’s voices and overheard conversations hover at the periphery of several songs. Wonder deepens the dimensions of the album with these intimate, everyday sounds, drawing correlations to childhood, memories, and the connections between people, not just between plants. It suggests that the album could seemingly arise out of anyone’s daily life. While the book and film could be esoteric, Wonder insisted that the album was in part about down-to-earth black life and love, telling The Washington Post that year that this music “comes just from my life.” Perhaps that’s why he had his ex-wife, Syreeta Wright, come to lend her soft vocals to the indelible piano ballad, “Come Back as a Flower,” wishing to spread the sweetness of love and envisioning “that with everything I was one.”

Human as it can be, The Secret Life of Plants is big and wide enough to be decidedly other , too, as when Wonder warps his platinum voice with a wide array of electronics. There’s the Brainfeeder funk of “Venus’ Flytrap and The Bug,” maybe the closest he ever got to the sound of his contemporary, George Clinton. And then there’s the femme falsetto he adopts to sing as Pan for one of Journey ’s sweet delights, “Power Flower.” A woozy, low-key gem in the Stevie Wonder songbook (check the stretched taffy of his coos-and-drums solo 3:30 into the song) and one of Janet Jackson’s favorites , Wonder utilizes his synths to make himself sound something other than human.

That strange, neutered, warbling, alien voice that arises on the astonishing “Race Babbling” is as visionary a sound as anything Stevie ever created. It’s a techno odyssey that resembles the likes of Carl Craig and Juan Atkins and the hazy, ethereal feel of Solange’s When I Get Home (she explicitly credited this album’s influence on her own approach). In the context of the film’s collage of sped-up urban scenes, it even anticipates Philip Glass’ groundbreaking score for another nature documentary, Koyaanisqatsi . Unfurling, clenching, spiraling, and mutating across its nine minutes, it’s the longest song on the album and approaches the sort of gender destabilization of something like the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual . Wonder’s voice morphs and merges with the timbres of trumpet and saxophone (his manically high-pitched vocal hook is a freakish delight), and later blurs into the harmonies of Josie James until it’s hard to parse who is who. It’s a disorienting effect in more ways than one, a queering of the biggest African-American male pop star of the era that’s still without precedent.

Rather than attempt to carry on with Key of Life ’s trajectory and his own heritage, Stevie had the rare cache to wander down every path, in effect making Motown his own private press label. No longer rooted to the traditions of soul, gospel or the sound of Motown that he built his legacy upon, Wonder literally branched out, reaching upward towards an undetermined new destination, exploring intuitively and fearlessly in a manner that few artists have ever managed to do in the history of pop music.

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The Secret Life of Plants

Documents the pain and joy plants experience and how they communicate it. Soundtrack by Stevie Wonder. Documents the pain and joy plants experience and how they communicate it. Soundtrack by Stevie Wonder. Documents the pain and joy plants experience and how they communicate it. Soundtrack by Stevie Wonder.

• Walon Green
• Christopher Bird
• Peter Tompkins
• Ruby Crystal
• John Ashley Hamilton
• Eartha Robinson
• 11 User reviews
• 6 Critic reviews
• 1 nomination

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• Soundtracks Come Back as a Flower Written by Stevie Wonder Sung by Syreeta Wright

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• Feb 15, 1999
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• December 13, 1978 (United States)
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Journey Through The Secret Life Of Plants (Soundtrack)

By Ken Tucker

Begin at the end. Stevie Wonder ‘s Journey through the Secret Life of Plants is so uneven, so full of tiny pleasures and bloated tedium, that for some assurance that Wonder hasn’t lost his touch, you ought to start by listening to the LP’s last cut. “Finale” commences with a quick, slapstick keyboard fill and then expands into an undulating instrumental whose billowing bass and synthesizers evoke a quivering field of flowers in bloom. Not only that, but the song works on an additional level as a sly parody of the kind of sweet bombast associated with silent-film melodramas.

After the delights of “Finale,” however, you’re on your own, since plucking the exhilarating moments from Journey through the Secret Life of Plants is a harrowing, highly subjective task. One person’s nectar is another’s Karo syrup, and the stamens of Wonder’s Plants are bursting with both.

The most problematic aspect of this album is the way it’s been presented: as Stevie Wonder’s first major studio release since Songs in the Key of Life in 1976. Well, yes and no. Most of the music here is from the soundtrack for a three-year-old film, The Secret Life of Plants , which was, in turn, based on a best-selling book.

As movie music, the LP succeeds, sometimes to mesmerizing effect. The entire first side, for example, coheres as a musical-botanical Talking Book of Genesis. The opening cut is called “Earth’s Creation,” and for once such a presumptuous title doesn’t overreach. Out of a cool, primordial silence emerge the wet, squeaky sounds of seeds thrusting up and out, like one of those Walt Disney nature documentaries in which stop-action photography shows a tulip blossoming in seconds.

Stevie Wonder creates sounds that are impossible to identify: the high, wafting trills that float through Journey through the Secret Life of Plants ‘ four sides might have been made by synthesizers, a string section, clarinets, any combination of these or none at all. Wonder’s technical mastery (he produced the disc and plays almost every instrument) works well in the service of the all-suggestive mysticism at the center of both the film’s subject (plants’ secret lives as a key to human knowledge) and his own career.

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But Wonder is caught in a dilemma. He’s too passionate to follow fully the old adage that good movie music stays in the background, repeats itself and guides the observer from scene to scene in an unobtrusive, reassuring manner. Sometimes he will and sometimes he won’t. The result is a strange succession of stunted songs, nattering ballads and wandering instrumentals that relies on the tiresome reprises of the most desultory soundtrack albums, the kind you buy for fond memories of the film but then never play. There’s “Send One Your Love” — a serenade built around a thin, quavering keyboard riff — given to us first as an instrumental orchestrated with a synthesized zither straight out of The Third Man , and then later as hit-single product adorned by woozy lyrics. Check out the ridiculously obvious theme song about the “discoveries we find inside the Secret Life of Plants.” And the wincingly ponderous mock-disco of “A Seed’s a Star and Tree Medley.”

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But there’s one entrancing, astute theme burrowing under Journey through the Secret Life of Plants that I’m sure is all Wonder’s because of its recurrence in his previous work: the comparison of plants and children. “Venus’ Flytrap and the Bug” climaxes with a child’s beseeching voice, while “Seasons” begins as a bedtime story to a wide-awake little inquisitor. A chorus of Oriental children sings a verse of “Ai No Sono.”

Like the radicalized Rousseau he is, Stevie Wonder presumes nature to exist in a state of pure innocence. Thus, the presexual condition of children is equated with green, tender sprouts — a neat, bold leap. Less neat and bold is the sad fact that, probably for the same reason, Wonder’s longtime musical representation of sensual awareness — tough, terse R&B and rock & roll — never penetrates Journey through the Secret Life of Plants. For a double-LP’s worth of music, we’re left with a few lovely but overwrought pop melodies, a renewed respect for Wonder’s technical prowess and an even fiercer desire to hear what he’ll create when he’s unfettered by the bana! restrictions of a movie-soundtrack assignment. And oh, yes: a gorgeous, funny “Finale.”

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Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants

October 30, 1979 20 Songs, 1 hour, 28 minutes A Motown Records release; ℗ 2014 UMG Recordings, Inc.

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• Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.88 x 5.59 x 0.51 inches; 4.59 ounces
• Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ Universal Japan
• Original Release Date ‏ : ‎ 2012
• Date First Available ‏ : ‎ July 14, 2012
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008E007OC
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Huge genetic study redraws the tree of life for flowering plants

Using genomic data from more than 9500 species, biologists have mapped the evolutionary relationships between flowering plants

24 April 2024

The pink lapacho tree is one of about 300,000 species of flowering plants

Roberto Tetsuo Okamura/Shutterstock

Botanists have mapped the evolutionary relationships between flowering plants using genomic data from more than 9500 species. The newly compiled tree of life will help scientists piece together the origins of flowering plants and inform future conservation efforts.

Around 90 per cent of land-dwelling plants are ones that flower and bear fruit, called angiosperms. These flowering plants are essential in maintaining Earth’s ecosystems, such as by storing carbon and producing oxygen, and make up the bulk of our diets.

The radical new experiments that hint at plant consciousness

“Our very existences are dependent on them,” says William Baker at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK. “That’s why we really need to understand them.”

For the past eight years, Baker and his colleagues have been working on completing trees of life that describe the evolutionary relationships between all genera of plants and fungi.

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Starting with flowering plants, the team designed molecular probes to search for 353 specific genes that can be found in the nuclei of all angiosperms. “The nuclear genome is humongous,” says Baker. “So we had to focus on a certain set of genes.”

So far, the researchers have sequenced the genes of 9506 species of flowering plants, mainly using specimens from collections around the world and public databases. This represents nearly all known angiosperm families and around 8000 of the 13,400 recorded genera. Some of the specimens sampled in the analysis are more than 200 years old, including a sandwort called Arenaria globiflora , and many came from extinct species, such as the Guadalupe Island olive ( Hesperelaea palmeri ).

By comparing similarities in the gene sequences of each flowering plant, the researchers were then able to figure out where they sat on the tree of life.

It is the most comprehensive look at angiosperms to date, says Baker. “We often liken it to the periodic table of elements,” he says. “It’s the fundamental framework for life.”

The angiosperm tree of life

Royal Botanical Gardens Kew

After their emergence around 140 million years ago, angiosperms quickly flourished , surpassing the flowerless gymnosperms as the world’s dominant plant type. The abrupt appearance of flowering plant diversity in the fossil record has stumped scientists for the past few centuries, with Charles Darwin calling it an “abominable mystery”.

Now, the tree of life confirms that around 80 per cent of major flowering plant lineages that are still around today were part of this early boom in angiosperm diversity. “We can’t say we’ve solved this ‘abominable mystery’, but we can at least say that there really is one,” says Baker.

The tree of life also sheds light on another surge in diversity that occurred around 40 million years ago, which was probably triggered by a drop in global temperatures at the time.

In future, the tree of life could also aid in the search for plants with pharmaceutical properties for new medicines, says Ilia Leitch , another member of the team at Kew. It can also help scientists identify new species and assess which ones may be the most vulnerable to climate change.

“This is the latest and greatest evolutionary framework from which to conduct new studies, getting closer to the mechanisms that allowed flowering plants to take over the globe,” says Ryan Folk at Mississippi State University.

Journal reference:

Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07324-0

• evolution /

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Vast DNA tree of life for flowering plants revealed by global science team

• Jim Erickson

Scientists use 1.8 billion letters of genetic code to build groundbreaking tree of life

The most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life is presented in a new study published today in the journal Nature by an international team of 279 scientists, including three University of Michigan biologists.

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 achievement sheds new light on the evolutionary history of flowering plants and their rise to ecological dominance on Earth.

Led by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the research team believes the data will aid future attempts to identify new species, refine plant classification, uncover new medicinal compounds, and conserve plants in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.

The major milestone for plant science, involving 138 organizations internationally, was built on 15 times more data than any comparable studies of the flowering plant tree of life. Among the species sequenced for this study, more than 800 have never had their DNA sequenced before.

The sheer amount of data unlocked by this research, which would take a single computer 18 years to process, is a huge stride toward building a tree of life for all 330,000 known species of flowering plants—a massive undertaking by Kew’s Tree of Life Initiative .

“Analyzing this unprecedented amount of data to decode the information hidden in millions of DNA sequences was a huge challenge. But it also offered the unique opportunity to reevaluate and extend our knowledge of the plant tree of life, opening a new window to explore the complexity of plant evolution,” said Alexandre Zuntini, a research fellow at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Tom Carruthers, postdoctoral researcher in the lab of U-M evolutionary biologist Stephen Smith, is co-lead author of the study with Zuntini, who he previously worked with at Kew. U-M plant systematist Richard Rabeler is a co-author.

“Flowering plants feed, clothe and greet us whenever we walk into the woods. The construction of a flowering plant tree of life has been a significant challenge and goal for the field of evolutionary biology for more than a century,” said Smith, co-author of the study and professor in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “This project moves us closer to that goal by providing a massive dataset for most of the genera of flowering plants and offering one strategy to complete this goal.”

Smith had two roles on the project. First, members of his lab—including former U-M graduate student Drew Larson—traveled to Kew to help sequence members of a large and diverse plant group called Ericales, which includes blueberries, tea, ebony, azaleas, rhododendrons and Brazil nuts.

Second, Smith supervised the analyses and construction of the project dataset along with William Baker and Felix Forest of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Wolf Eisenhardt of Aarhus University.

“One of the biggest challenges faced by the team was the unexpected complexity underlying many of the gene regions, where different genes tell different evolutionary histories. Procedures had to be developed to examine these patterns on a scale that hadn’t been done before,” said Smith, who is also director of the Program in Biology and an associate curator in biodiversity informatics at the U-M Herbarium.

As co-leader of the study, Carruthers’ main responsibilities included scaling the evolutionary tree to time using 200 fossils, analyzing the different evolutionary histories of the genes underlying the overall evolutionary tree, and estimating rates of diversification in different flowering plant lineages at different times.

“Constructing such a large tree of life for flowering plants, based on so many genes, sheds light on the evolutionary history of this special group, helping us to understand how they came to be such an integral and dominant part of the world,” Carruthers said. “The evolutionary relationships that are presented—and the data underlying them—will provide an important foundation for a lot of future studies.”

The flowering plant tree of life, much like our own family tree, enables us to understand how different species are related to each other. The tree of life is uncovered by comparing DNA sequences between different species to identify changes (mutations) that accumulate over time like a molecular fossil record.

Our understanding of the tree of life is improving rapidly in tandem with advances in DNA sequencing technology. For this study, new genomic techniques were developed to magnetically capture hundreds of genes and hundreds of thousands of letters of genetic code from every sample, orders of magnitude more than earlier methods.

A key advantage of the team’s approach is that it enables a wide diversity of plant material, old and new, to be sequenced, even when the DNA is badly damaged. 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.

“In many ways this novel approach has allowed us to collaborate with the botanists of the past by tapping into the wealth of data locked up in historic herbarium specimens, some of which were collected as far back as the early 19th century,” said Baker, senior research leader for Kew’s Tree of Life Initiative.

“Our illustrious predecessors, such as Charles Darwin or Joseph Hooker, could not have anticipated how important these specimens would be in genomic research today. DNA was not even discovered in their lifetimes. Our work shows just how important these incredible botanical museums are to groundbreaking studies of life on Earth. Who knows what other undiscovered science opportunities lie within them?”

Across all 9,506 species sequenced, more than 3,400 came from material sourced from 163 herbaria in 48 countries.

“Sampling herbarium specimens for the study of plant relationships makes broad sampling from diverse areas of the world much more feasible than if one had to travel to get fresh material from the field,” said U-M’s Rabeler, a research scientist emeritus and former collection manager at the U-M Herbarium.

For the tree of life project, Rabeler helped verify the identity of herbarium specimens selected for sampling and analyzed the resulting data.

Flowering plants alone account for about 90% of all known plant life on land and are found virtually everywhere on the planet—from the steamiest tropics to the rocky outcrops of the Antarctic Peninsula. And yet, our understanding of how these plants came to dominate the scene soon after their origin has baffled scientists for generations, including Darwin.

Flowering plants originated more than 140 million years ago after which they rapidly overtook other vascular plants including their closest living relatives—the gymnosperms (nonflowering plants that have naked seeds, such as cycads, conifers and ginkgo).

Darwin was mystified by the seemingly sudden appearance of such diversity in the fossil record. In an 1879 letter to Hooker, his close confidant and director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he wrote: “The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery.”

Using 200 fossils, the authors scaled their tree of life to time, revealing how flowering plants evolved across geological time. They found that early flowering plants did indeed explode in diversity, giving rise to more than 80% of the major lineages that exist today shortly after their origin.

However, this trend then declined to a steadier rate for the next 100 million years until another surge in diversification about 40 million years ago, coinciding with a global decline in temperatures. These new insights would have fascinated Darwin and will surely help today’s scientists grappling with the challenges of understanding how and why species diversify.

Assembling a tree of life this extensive would have been impossible without Kew’s scientists collaborating with many partners across the globe. In total, 279 authors were involved in the research, representing many different nationalities from 138 organizations in 27 countries.

“The plant community has a long history of collaborating and coordinating molecular sequencing to generate a more comprehensive and robust plant tree of life. The effort that led to this paper continues in that tradition but scales up quite significantly,” said U-M’s Smith.

The flowering plant tree of life has enormous potential in biodiversity research. This is because, just as one can predict the properties of an element based on its position in the periodic table, the location of a species in the tree of life allows us to predict its properties. The new data will thus be invaluable for enhancing many areas of science and beyond.

To enable this, the tree and all of the data that underpin it have been made openly and freely accessible to both the public and scientific community, including through the Kew Tree of Life Explorer .

Open access will help scientists to make the best use of the data, such as combining it with artificial intelligence to predict which plant species may include molecules with medicinal potential.

Similarly, the tree of life can be used to better understand and predict how pests and diseases are going to affect plants in the future. Ultimately, the authors note, the applications of this data will be driven by the ingenuity of the scientists accessing it.

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How the plant world shapes the climate cycle

by Andrew Curry, ETH Zurich

In order to understand the Earth's resilience, researchers at ETH Zurich are modeling climate changes from times long past. And they show that plants are not simply victims of circumstances, but have helped to shape climate conditions on Earth.

Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, Earth has lived through a series of climatic shifts, shaping the planet as we know it today. Past changes in CO 2 levels and temperature can help us understand the planet's response to global warming today.

As part of a growing field called biogeodynamics, researchers are racing to understand how such changes have impacted life on the planet in the past. "We're trying to understand processes relevant to the present using the geological past," says Julian Rogger, who focuses on biogeodynamics at the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich.

Rogger is fascinated by the interplay of plant life and climate. So far our planet is the only one we know of in the universe suited to support living organisms. Its climatic conditions allow for the presence of enough liquid water to enable plants and other complex organisms to thrive, or at least survive.

When the planet's climate shifts, it impacts plant life, forcing ecosystems to evolve and adapt to changing conditions. "I'm interested in the role of life itself in the whole system," Rogger says. "I find it really fascinating to reconstruct the world as it was millions of years ago."

Plants actively shape the climate cycle

In a paper published recently in the journal Science Advances , Rogger and colleagues from ETH and the University of Leeds argue that those plants aren't just passive participants in Earth's climate cycle —they can play an important role in shaping it. "We could assume life is just reacting to changes, but it's also possible it's interacting with the system and regulates it," Rogger says.

To show how, Rogger used computer models that simulate the interplay between climate change , movement of the continents and plant life in the deep past. The models indicate plants probably help regulate the makeup of the planet's atmosphere by trapping carbon and emitting oxygen, helping control CO 2 levels.

They also accelerate the process of mineral weathering in soils, a process that consumes CO 2 . Rogger's models suggest the planet's climate and atmosphere are part of a feedback loop: Life itself plays a role in regulating or accelerating climatic changes.

Reconstructing 390 million years of Earth's history

When change is slow—slow enough for plants to evolve or spread to new niches over millions of years—plant activity can act as a buffer, preventing temperatures from shifting too rapidly. But geology and the fossil record show there were also changes that took place too fast, and resulted in major disruptions of vegetation and even mass extinctions.

"What we want to know is how fast vegetation is able to change its characteristics when the world suddenly gets 5 or 6 degrees warmer," Rogger says. "The overall goal is to understand the co-evolution of climate, vegetation and tectonics."

Rogger and his co-authors—an interdisciplinary team of geologists, computer scientists and earth scientists—created a computer model of the last 390 million years that took into account the shifting of the continents and climate and the vegetation's response to these changes. Running simulations on powerful supercomputers can still take up to a month, given the complexity of the problem and the length of time they are supposed to represent.

Whenever possible, the team uses geological data to make the models as realistic as possible: Chemical analysis of sediments, for example, can be an indicator for carbon dioxide levels in the past. Fossils can show when dramatic shifts in climate led to mass extinctions, or the evolution of new ecosystems in response to changing conditions.

The models show that long periods of stability make it possible for vegetation to flourish, absorbing CO 2 and stabilizing the Earth's climate over time. In their models, the team saw that plants were able to evolve fast enough to adjust to gradual shifts in climate and landscapes due to continental drift, for example.

But when the climate system is disrupted and changes too rapidly for vegetation to adapt, the opposite happens: Plants are wiped out and can't act as a buffer to slow downshifts in climate. Without plants to act as a brake, environmental changes happen even faster and push further toward the extreme.

"It's like a feedback effect," Rogger explains. "Because regulation falls away, you could have a stronger increase in CO 2 and more climate change than was previously expected."

Resilience put to the test

In the geological record, abrupt climate changes are often accompanied by mass extinction events. "There are strong vegetation changes where it took thousands to millions of years for vegetation to adapt and recover," Rogger says, "and what recovers can be very different than what was there before."

That's not good news. "The rate of change we have at the moment is thought to be unprecedented over the past 400 million years," Rogger says. "There could be a reduction in the capacity of vegetation to regulate climate if there is a strong change, like we're experiencing now."

At a time when the Earth's climate is changing faster than ever before, Rogger's research has practical implications: Information from the past can help people today understand how resilient the Earth's interlocking systems are.

"How fast are ecosystems able to respond to changes in the climate and landscape? That's one of the major unknowns," he says. "It's an acute question—how resilient is the Earth?"

Journal information: Science Advances

Provided by ETH Zurich

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Vast DNA tree of life for plants revealed by global science team

Press release from Florida Museum of Natural History

GAINESVILLE, Fla.  – A  new paper  published today in the journal Nature presents the most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life; the paper was authored by an international team of 279 scientists that included two scientists at the Florida Museum of Natural History and was led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Using 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from over 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. The study’s authors believe the data will aid future attempts to identify new species, refine plant classification, uncover new medicinal compounds, and conserve plants in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss.

The major milestone for plant science, led by Kew and involving 138 organizations from 27 countries, was built on 15 times more data than any comparable studies of the flowering plant tree of life. Among the species sequenced for this study, more than 800 have never had their DNA sequenced before.

“This is an incredible example of collaboration among the world’s botanists, and the result is new insight into plant evolutionary history,” said co-author Pam Soltis, a distinguished professor and curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Whereas previous studies have often heavily relied on DNA from chloroplasts, the source of energy production in plants, researchers in this study sequenced DNA from nuclei. The latter can be difficult to analyze, but it contains unique information about an organism’s evolutionary history. 

“Most of our understanding of flowering plant relationships has come from sequencing portions of the chloroplast genome—this study in contrast provides data from numerous nuclear genes, the Rosetta stone we have long needed for interpreting the evolutionary history of this major part of the tree of life,” said co-author and museum distinguished professor Doug Soltis.

Unlocking historic herbarium specimens for cutting-edge research

Flowering plants alone account for about 90% of all known plant life on land and are found virtually everywhere on the planet – from the steamiest tropics to the rocky outcrops of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The flowering plant tree of life, much like our own family tree, enables us to understand how different species are related to each other. The tree of life is uncovered by comparing DNA sequences between different species to identify changes (mutations) that accumulate over time like a molecular fossil record. Our understanding of the tree of life is improving rapidly in tandem with advances in DNA sequencing technology. For this study, new genomic techniques were developed to magnetically capture hundreds of genes and hundreds of thousands of letters of genetic code from every sample, orders of magnitude more than earlier methods.

A key advantage of the team’s approach is that it enables a wide diversity of plant material, old and new, to be sequenced, even when the DNA is badly damaged. 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. Using such specimens, the team successfully sequenced a sandwort ( Arenaria globiflora ) collected nearly 200 years ago in Nepal and, despite the poor quality of its DNA, were able to place it in the tree of life.

More than 500 of the species sequenced for the study are currently at risk of extinction, according to the IUCN Red List. The team also analyzed specimens of species that are already extinct, such as the Guadalupe Island olive ( Hesperelaea palmeri ), which has not been seen alive since 1875.

“In many ways this novel approach has allowed us to collaborate with the botanists of the past by tapping into the wealth of data locked up in historic herbarium specimens, some of which were collected as far back as the early 19th Century,” said co-author William Baker, a senior research leader at Kew. “Our illustrious predecessors such as Charles Darwin or Joseph Hooker could not have anticipated how important these specimens would be in genomic research today.”

Across all 9,506 species sequenced, over 3,400 came from material sourced from 163 herbaria in 48 countries. Additional material from plant collections around the world, including DNA banks, seeds, and living collections, have been vital for filling key knowledge gaps to shed new light on the history of flowering plant evolution. The team also benefited from publicly available data for over 1,900 species, highlighting the value of the open science approach to future genomic research.

Putting the plant tree of life to good use

The flowering plant tree of life has enormous potential in biodiversity research. This is because, just as one can predict the properties of an element based on its position in the periodic table, the location of a species in the tree of life allows us to predict its properties. The new data will thus be invaluable for enhancing many areas of science and beyond.

To enable this, the tree and all of the data that underpin it have been made openly and freely accessible to both the public and scientific community, including through the Kew Tree of Life Explorer. The study’s authors believe such open access is key to democratizing access to scientific data across the globe. 

Open access will also help scientists to make the best use of the data, such as combining it with artificial intelligence to predict which plant species may have molecules with medicinal potential. Similarly, the tree of life can be used to better understand and predict how pests and diseases are going to affect the plants of a given region in the future. Ultimately, the authors note, the applications of these data will be driven by the ingenuity of the scientists accessing the information.

“Plant chemicals have inspired many pharmaceutical drugs but still have great untapped potential to aid future drug discovery,” said co-author and Kew senior research leader Melanie-Jayne Howes. “The challenge is knowing which to investigate scientifically in the search for new medicines out of the 330,000 flowering plant species.”

The post Vast DNA tree of life for plants revealed by global science team appeared first on Alachua Chronicle .