Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405-3700 USA;
Am J Bot. 2004 Oct;91(10):1437-45. doi: 10.3732/ajb.91.10.1437.
We provide a brief overview of this special issue on the plant tree of life, describing its history and the general nature of its articles. We then present our estimate for the overall topology and, for land plants, divergence times of the plant tree of life. We discuss several major controversies and unsolved problems in resolving portions of this tree. We conclude with a few thoughts about the prospects for obtaining a comprehensive, robustly resolved, and accurately dated plant tree of life and the importance of such a grand endeavor.
我们简要概述了本期关于植物生命之树的特刊，描述了它的历史和文章的大致性质。然后，我们给出了对植物生命之树整体拓扑结构的估计，以及陆地植物的分歧时间。我们讨论了在解决该树的某些部分时出现的几个主要争议和未解决的问题。最后，我们对获得全面、稳健解决和准确日期的植物生命之树的前景以及这样一项宏伟努力的重要性进行了一些思考。
