( The plant with the world's largest flow...)World's largest flower evolved from family of much tinier blooms

The plant with the world's largest flower -- typically a full meter across, with a bud the size of a basketball -- evolved from a family of plants whose blossoms are nearly all tiny, botanists write this week in the journal Science. Their genetic analysis of rafflesia reveals that it is closely related to a family that includes poinsettias, the trees that produce natural rubber, castor oil plants, and the tropical root crop cassava.

The team from Harvard University, Southern Illinois University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Wisconsin was led by Harvard's Charles C. Davis.

"For nearly 200 years rafflesia's lineage has confounded plant scientists," says Davis, an assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "As a parasite living inside the tissue of a tropical vine, the plant lacks leaves, shoots, or roots, making it difficult to compare to more conventional plants. Most efforts to place plants in the botanical tree of life in the past 25 years have tracked ancestry using molecular markers in genes governing photosynthesis. Rafflesia is a non-photosynthetic parasite, and those genes have apparently been abandoned, meaning that to determine its lineage we had to look at other parts of the plant's genome."

Davis and his colleagues determined that over an estimated 46 million years, rafflesia's blooms, which now weigh up to 15 lbs., evolved at an accelerated pace. However, after increasing in size by a factor of roughly 79, the plant then reverted to a more sedate evolutionary pace.

This evolutionary spurt is one of the most dramatic size changes ever reported among eukaryotes; if humans were to undergo comparable evolutionary growth, Davis says, an average man would end up some 146 meters tall, roughly the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Because rafflesia lacks the genes most commonly used to trace plant ancestry, the scientists delved deeper in
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Source:Harvard University

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