Researcher helps solve 5,000-year-old mystery: Team deciphers the Bamboo family tree
Thursday, April 11, 2013 - 08:30
in Paleontology & Archaeology
(Phys.org) —For more than 5,000 years, people have studied bamboo: its uses, growth forms, unusual flowering cycles, and its relationship to other plant groups. Until now, the relationships among the major lineages of bamboos, called "tribes," were not known with any certainty. But a new paper in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution reveals the ancient story of bamboo using DNA analysis and provides the most convincing evidence to date of their long evolutionary history.