An entire botanical garden of genomes

An article published today in the Open-Access journal GigaScience provides data that effectively triples the number of plant species with available genome data. This mammoth amount of work comes on the back of the growing efforts of the scientific community to sequence more plant genomes to aid in understanding their complex evolution and provide practical information for improving agricultural yield. To date, around 350 land plant genomes have been sequenced. The desire for more plant genome sequences has recently been highlighted with the announcement of the 10KP project, which aims to ultimately sequence 10,000 plant genomes to resolve the evolution of all the major branches of the plant tree of life. The work here provides images, raw sequencing data, assembled chloroplast genomes, and preliminary nuclear genome assemblies- all freely available. Effectively this work is a digital representation of an entire botanical garden.