Focus Taiwan
Date: 2017/09/21
By: Chang Jung-hsiang and Kuan-lin Liu
Taipei, Sept. 21 (CNA) A research team at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU)
Image taken from Pixabay
has cracked the code on the evolution of orchids, the school in southern Taiwan said Thursday.
At a press conference, NCKU President Su Huey-jen (蘇慧貞) said the key to solving the mystery of the evolution of orchids was a primitive genus called Apostasia.
In a paper published earlier this month in Nature Magazine, the NCKU research team said the Apostasia, which has been completely mapped out, provided a reference for inferring the genome content and structure of the most recent common ancestor of the modern orchid.
The Apostasia odorata is the oldest in the orchid family, having existed some 77 million years ago, though it looks nothing like the modern day orchid, the team said in the paper titled “The Apostasia genome and the evolution of orchids.”
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