SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, July 17. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The use of genetic and genomic tools help to understand how the different plants have evolved and diversified, as may be the case of the Canary Islands, where there are many endemisms that are characterized by having a specific type of pollinator. Studying these mechanisms makes it possible to unravel the bases of these changes and to understand the processes of speciation and diversification in other flowering plants.
This is stated by the researcher Javier Fuertes, researcher at the CSIC and the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid, as well as a pioneer in the use of molecular tools at the RJB-CSIC and who has made important contributions to the study of aspects such as hybridization, phylogeography, phylogeny and biogeography of flowering plant species.
He is also currently collaborating with the Nextgendem project of the Viera y Clavijo Canary Islands Botanical Garden, where his previous research has contributed to reaching the hypothesis of the article ‘Hypothesis of the increase in endemicity of the late Pleistocene’, recently published in the Journal of Biogeography.
In an interview in the magazine ‘Greentank’ collected by Europa Press, Javier Fuertes points out that, apart from the collaboration in Nextgendem, they are currently developing a research project, the Nextpol project, which tries to find out what the genes of plants are that change when pollinators change.
“In the Canary Islands we find species that are pollinated by birds and insects and that are related to each other. If we study with genomics and transcriptomics tools what is the fraction of the genome that is expressed in each type of flower, we can see what are the genes that allow the adaptation of the different species to each type of pollinator”, he explains.
According to Javier Fuertes, each living being has characteristic gene sequences that allow it to be identified: “We can compare these genes between different species and develop a type of ‘family tree’, the phylogenetic tree, which helps us to know at what point in evolution and where they originated in. The widespread use of very powerful genetic and genomic tools helps us understand how different plants have evolved and diversified.
The researcher highlights that, precisely, adaptation to different pollinators is one of the engines that promotes the diversification of plants in a given environment. “For example, in the Canary Islands there are many endemisms that are characterized by having a specific type of pollinator. When we study these mechanisms, we can unravel the bases of these changes and understand the processes of speciation and diversification in other flowering plants”, says the expert.
Fuertes stresses that the fact of knowing the genome makes it possible to find out what the kinship relationships are between the different endemic species of the Canary Islands: “This is what phylogenetics is about, drawing up kinship trees between the different species. The problem is that plants have genomes that are between 10 and 1,000 times larger than the human genome. This requires processing a large amount of data that we have to obtain and using bioinformatics techniques on very powerful computers”.
The researcher clarifies that the genome of plants, although a constant number of genes is maintained (between 30,000 and 40,000), are very large. “The difficulty in carrying out a study of genomes is that a large part of them are made up of repetitive elements that are not translated into proteins, but that in many cases fulfill a very important structural or regulatory function of genes. Due to their repetitive nature , these types of elements are what make it difficult for us to assemble genomes,” he adds.
“It’s one of the big hurdles we face when we have to assemble plant genomes compared to human genomes or animal and bacterial genomes, which are so much smaller. Transposons are a kind of repetitive element that because of their nature contribute to changes within the same genome, even within the same individual in different tissues and organs”, says the expert.
