Earth's earliest flowering plants

Closing out the spring season of Research Unplugged, Claude dePamphilis lead a discussion about the Earth's oldest flowers and what they can tell us. This talk was just one of the results of dePamphilis' six year Floral Genome Project which has also yielded 90 papers on the various findings.

The Floral Genome Project, established by Dr. dePamphilis, has been sequencing and examining the genomes of flowering plants in the hopes of better understanding their evolution. With this better understanding of the genetic history of some of the planet's earliest flowering plants, important advances in medicine and agriculture could be achieved such as:

• regulating fruit development to increase nutritional value
• developing non-addictive pain relievers (i.e. morphine and other opiates)
  

Read the full Research Penn State article about the research.