Plant and Fungal Trees of Life (PAFTOL)

Discovering and disseminating the evolutionary history of all plant and fungal genera

Evolutionary trees are powerful tools for prediction, species discovery, monitoring and conservation. They help us understand how the world’s plants and fungi are related to each other and how they have evolved. Through comparative analysis of DNA sequence data, the backbone of the tree of life is already relatively well understood, and many components have been studied in great detail. However, data are still lacking for many genera and the majority of species of plants and fungi, preventing their accurate placement within this evolutionary framework. Exploiting Kew’s unrivalled collections, the Plant and Fungal Trees of Life project (PAFTOL) is now completing the tree, by generating and compiling high throughput DNA sequence data for one representative of all 14,000 flowering plant genera and all 8,200 fungal genera by 2020.

About PAFTOL

Expected outputs

Genomic data for one representative of all 14,000 flowering plant genera.
Genomic data for one representative of all 8,200 fungal genera.
Creation of the Angiosperm353 probe kit, a universal toolkit for targeted sequencing of 353 genes from any flowering plant.
The publication of high impact science papers of relevance to the broadest scientific audience.
Up-to-date tree of life (and all underpinning data) made publicly available online.
Engagement and dialogue around PAFTOL's research and approaches with both the public and scientific communities.

Funded by

The Calleva Foundation
The Sackler Trust
Garfield Weston

PAFTOL plants staff

Principal investigators

Dr William Baker
Dr Félix Forest
Dr Ilia Leitch
Dr Paul Kersey

Project staff

Data production team
Dr Olivier Maurin
Dr Jim Clarkson
Dr Alexandre Zuntini
Robyn Cowan
Elaine Francoso
Shyamali Roy

Data analysis team
Dr Paul Bailey
Dr Kevin Leempoel
Dr Tom Carruthers

Kew Tree of Life Explorer team
Eduardo Toledo
Berta Gallego
Malcolm Stone
Jeffrey Cook

Project alumni
Dr Abigail Barker
Dr Lisa Pokorny
Dr Sidonie Bellot
Dr Laura Botigue
Grace Brewer
Dr Steven Dodsworth
Niroshini Epitawalage
Dr Wolf Eiserhardt
Dr Jan Kim
Vanessa Barber

Data and methods

PAFTOL data are available are publicly accessible via the Kew Tree of Life Explorer and our secure FTP.

All data generated by PAFTOL are publicly released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license and the Toronto guidelines on pre-publication data sharing (Toronto International Data Release Workshop Authors 2009).

Raw sequence reads are deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive under umbrella project PRJEB35285.

Scripts and other files relating to our phylogenomic pipeline are available at our GitHub.

Full details of the PAFTOL methods workflow for plants can be found in Baker et al. 2021.

A summary of our methods can be found here.

Sub-projects and collaborations

We currently have special projects on the following plant families and if you would like to find out more about our progress, or how to contribute, please email the associated contact:

Acanthaceae, Achariaceae, Aizoaceae, Anacardiaceae, Amaryllidaceae, Apiales, Aquifoliales, Araceae, Arecaceae, Asphodelaceae, Asteraceae, Caryophyllales, Celastrales, Chrysobalanaceae, Connaraceae, Cunoniaceae, Cyperaceae, Dioscoreales, Orchidaceae, Ericales, Euphorbiaceae, Fabaceae, Fabaceae (Phaseolineae), Gentianales, Iridaceae, Lamiales, Laurales (Monimiaceae), Linderniaceae, Magnoliales, Malpighiales, Malvales, Moraceae, Myristicaceae, Myrtales, Ochnaceae, Oxalidales, Poaceae, Podostemaceae, Portulacineae, Primulaceae, Proteales, Sapindaceae, Sapindales, Solanaceae, Thymelaeaceae & Urticaceae.

PAFTOL is actively working with other projects and initiatives that share our goals:

Publications and reports

All PAFTOL publications are listed in our Research Repository.

Updates

Contact

PAFTOL actively seeks opportunities to collaborate and we encourage anyone who would like to work with us to email paftolplants@kew.org