Orchidaceae963

Orchids are one of the most speciose group of plants on Earth. There are nearly 27,000 recognized species of orchids, with new species being described every year.

Unfortunately, many orchid species face extinction in the wild. The main threats are poaching for the illegal orchid trade, habitat destruction, and disease. Scientists today are developing tools to help combat orchid extinction.

Scientists at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, in collaboration with the University of Georgia and the University of Missouri-Columbia, have developed at toolkit that allows researchers to sequence hundreds of genes from a single DNA sample. 

This toolkit, called the Orchidaceae963, allows for advances in orchid phylogenetics, population genetics, and molecular identification.

The poorest performance of the Orchidaceae963 is in the Cypripedioideae and Orchidoideae subfamilies, which are the slipper orchids and other terrestrial orchids. We are digging into the data to understand why and where we can improve performance for these species.

We plan to keep improving. The next steps involve improving performance for the terrestrial and slipper orchids, further testing on the Vanilla subfamily, and testing the utility for population genomics.

We are excited to see how this toolkit is used in the future!!

Check out the open access publication of the Orchidaceae963 toolkit here in Applications in Plant Sciences