Format: ORAL

William J. Baker the PAFTOL Community

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, United Kingdom

The tree of life is the fundamental biological roadmap for navigating the evolution and properties of life on Earth, and yet remains largely unknown. Even angiosperms are fraught with data gaps, despite their critical role in sustaining terrestrial life. Since 2016, the Plant Fungal Trees of Life (PAFTOL) project at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has targeted this knowledge gap in angiosperms by leveraging biological collections with novel genomic tools at unprecedented scale.Here, we describe our efforts to complete the angiosperm tree of life for all genera. Key achievements include:(1)the creation of Angiosperms353, an innovative, open-access, target sequence capture toolkit for tree of life research on any flowering plant; (2) the assembly of Angiosperms353 sequence data for 8,336 (61%) of the 13,600 genera of flowering plants, amounting to over 1.5 billion base pairs in total; (3) a tree of life containing all 7,514 genera of flowering plants sequenced to date, integrating novel data for over 8,000 samples, with data sourced from collaborators and public resources; (4) the Kew Tree of Life Explorer (https://treeoflife.kew.org/) launched in February 2021, an open data portal through which our tree of life and all data are made publicly available, with release 3.0 (April 2023) containing data for 10,377 samples; (5) a collaborative network of >300 individuals worldwide driving numerous projects using Angiosperms353 data; (6) outreach activities communicating the science of PAFTOL to the public. A wealth of primary research has also arisen from our data ranging from species-level studies, through to big picture analyses exploring the rise of the angiosperms. As the project approaches its goal of sampling all angiosperm genera, we welcome collaboration from all corners of the community and encourage anyone with interests in working with us on data generation, sharing or utilisation to get in touch.