https://en.people.cn/n3/2026/0212/c90000-20425867.html

Chinese scientists have launched an ambitious international megascience project to decode the genetic blueprint of major land plant lineages, aiming to construct a complete “tree of life” for flora and address pressing global challenges in food security and biodiversity conservation. The initiative, called PLANeT, was officially launched in Beijing on Wednesday. It is co-led by the CAAS Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen (AGIS) https://agis.caas.cn/en/ in partnership with the Botanical Society of China, Peking University, and more than 40 other institutions from 15 countries and regions, according to an AGIS press release issued on Thursday.

The project will systematically sample plant orders and families currently missing from genomic databases. By utilizing phylogenomic methods, researchers aim to resolve the contentious evolutionary relationships and divergence times among all major plant groups to draw a comprehensive “tree of life,” said Wang Li, a principal researcher of the initiative from AGIS.

A critical bottleneck facing botanical science is that over 99 percent of the estimated 450,000 land plant species lack high-quality reference genomes. This data gap severely constrains understanding of plant evolution and functional potential.

PLANeT is committed to open and shared international cooperation.