Evolution key to food security, new drug discoveries

Chinese scientists, working 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 recently by more than 40 institutions worldwide, including the Botanical Society of China, Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences' Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen.

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

"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 — combining evolutionary biology with genomics to understand relationships among organisms — researchers plan to construct a high-resolution phylogenetic tree of land plants, Wang said.

According to Wang, handling and analyzing the massive volume of genomic data generated by the project poses another major challenge. 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 strategies for biodiversity conservation. Traditional conservation efforts are often constrained by limited field observations. Genomic information, however, allows scientists to identify species experiencing genetic erosion more efficiently, enabling assessments of extinction risk and better-informed protection strategies.

Wang said the project has already completed the 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 establishing a common language of land plants," she added.

Beyond biodiversity conservation, the project is expected to support 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 and strengthen global food security.

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