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An international team of botanists have identified the one ancestor of all flowering plants on Earth. Thought to have bloomed between 250m and 140m, the team reconstructed the first of all flowering plants. The study published in Nature Communications furthers our understanding of the origin of floral diversity and evolution of flowering plants.

These marvellous floral specimens transformed the face of the planet, driving change in ecosystems and climate, as well as driving the rapid evolution of pollinating insects. Today, they represent 90% of all land plants, and considering that the survival of terrestrial life is heavily dependent on these organisms, we share the top recommendations about flowering plants, thinking about their development and productivity. [Update 15 August: this article has now been recommended on F1000Prime by Faculty Member Doug Soltis from University of Florida]  We also include our usual top 3 articles for the month and our Hidden Jewels. Click on the images for full access to the recommendations.

F1000Prime is a literature recommendation service. The service has a peer-nominated global Faculty of more than 8,000 of the world’s leading biomedical scientists and clinicians who select those articles they think are particularly interesting and important, and write recommendations explaining their selection. From the numerical ratings awarded, we have created a unique system for quantifying the importance of individual articles.

Top 3 article recommendations about flowering plants

“To what extent, and how, parental genomes influence development of the embryo is a major question in plant reproductive biology. This study provides compelling evidence for a novel paternal parent-of-origin effect in Arabidopsis thaliana.” – Kay Schneitz, Technische University Munchen, Germany

“This paper is a must read for those interested in the mechanistic basis of vernalization, the promotion of flowering by a long period of low temperature treatment, as well as those with general interests in plant epigenetic phenomena.” – Michael Thomashow, Michigan State University, US

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“The paper by Zhang et al. provides the first comprehensive, high-resolution DNA methylation map of the model plant Arabidopsis. Besides confirmation of DNA methylation in controlling heterochromatin, transposons, pseudogenes, and siRNA clusters, this paper also offers genome-wide evidence of DNA methylation in regulating gene expression.” – Xing Wang Deng, Peking University, China

 

Current Top 3 recommendations

Rankings are generated using the articles recommended in F1000Prime during the preceding 30 days.

“This paper offers a new look at the ability to predict protein structure in a more facile way. They combine sequence alignment with metagenome sequence data to improve modelling by matching predictions with known structures.” – Pamela Silver, Harvard Medical School, US

“In this technical tour de force, Graham et al. use single-molecule visualisation methods to investigate the mechanism of DNA replication using purified bacterial proteins.” – Mark Dillingham, University of Bristol, UK

“This is an important and definitive resource for all those working with human dendritic cells. Notably, it also suggests that the “dendritic cell” component of “plasmacytoid dendritic cells” is due to contamination with conventional dendritic cells and their precursors.” – Caetano Reos e Sousa, Francis Crick Institute, London, UK

Hidden Jewels

Hidden Jewels rankings only include articles published in specialist journals, recommended in F1000Prime during the preceding 30 days.

“Data science and visualization applied to the universe of drug targets: this article provides helpful overviews of innovation patterns and compound properties at a high level – a useful resource for teaching, and an insightful way to step back and look at the big picture of drug discovery history.” – Martin Stahl, Roche Innovation Center Basel, Switzerland

“An excellent piece of work. It is, however, retrospective but such compelling findings call out for a proper randomized controlled trial (RCT).” – Michael Irwin, University of Hong Kong, China

“The authors performed a thorough retrospective comparative analysis of combined spinal epidural anesthesia (CSEA) versus continuous lumbar epidural anesthesia (CLEA) that showed a significantly lower risk of epidural catheter failures in the CSEA group, and no delay in recognizing epidural catheter failures with CSEA versus CLEA.” – Bernard Wittels, Saint Francis Hospital, USA