An international team of researchers led by Penn State has shed light on the water lily’s genome and transcriptome using high-throughput next-generation sequencing technology. The purpose was to understand the early evolution of angiosperms, the group of all flowering plants. Researchers have employed molecular dating to evaluate the separation of the group of water lilies from different groups of related aquatic plants at somewhere close to 147 and 185 million years ago, with an entire genome duplication (WGD)/polyploidy event at about the same time. The research enabled scientists to collect most by far of the genome into 14 chromosomes and they discovered almost 31 thousand protein-coding genes.