Chinese researchers launch global project to explore plants' evolutionary history, unlock genetic assets

Chinese scientists, in collaboration with international research institutions, have launched a global project to explore the evolutionary history of plants and unlock genetic resources critical for biodiversity conservation and future food security.

The PLANeT initiative was officially launched on Wednesday by over 40 institutions worldwide, including the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen under the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the Botanical Society of China, and Peking University.

Plants have evolved extraordinary diversity over hundreds of millions of years, yet scientists still lack a clear picture of how major plant groups are related, Wang Li, a researcher at the genomics institute and one of the project's lead scientists, said.

"Tracing the critical nodes in plant evolution is essential to understand the genetic basis of traits that plants share — and those that make them unique," Wang said.

More than 99 percent of land plant species still lack high-quality reference genomes, a gap that has limited evolutionary and genetic studies.

PLANeT aims to fill that gap by systematically sampling plant groups at key taxonomic levels that currently lack reference genomes. Using phylogenomic methods, researchers plan to construct a high-resolution phylogenetic tree of land plants, according to Wang.

Handling and analyzing the massive volumes of genomic data generated by the project poses another major challenge, Wang said. To accelerate progress, PLANeT will integrate artificial intelligence into its research framework.

"Just as language models learn grammar and meaning from large amounts of text, genomic language models can learn the 'common language' of plants," Wang said.

By analyzing tens of thousands of plant genomes, AI systems will be trained to recognize conserved DNA sequence patterns, regulatory networks, and functional modules embedded in DNA sequences.

The data may also provide invaluable strategies for biodiversity conservation. Traditional conservation efforts are often constrained by limited field observations. Genomic information, however, allows scientists to efficiently identify species with genetic erosion, enabling assessments of extinction risk and better-informed biodiversity protection strategies.

Wang said the project has already completed assembly of genomes for representative species from all orders of angiosperms.

"Our goals include identifying 1,000 bioactive natural products for drug discovery, discovering 100 potential new economic crops, and achieving one set of common language of land plants," she said.

Apart from biodiversity conservation, the project will enable crop improvement in a changing climate. By mining genes crucial for disease resistance, drought, and salt tolerance, researchers hope to help breed climate-resilient crops, securing global food security.

"We can foresee that the project will greatly drive across a broad spectrum of research fields—from fundamental studies and biodiversity conservation to crop improvement and natural product-inspired drug discovery," Chong Kang, president of the Botanical Society of China and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said.