Zhi-Duan Chen

TL;DR: This study demonstrates that Amboreella, Nymphaeales and Illiciales-Trimeniaceae-Austrobaileya represent the first stage of angiosperm evolution, with Amborella being sister to all other angiosperms, and shows that Gnetales are related to the conifers and are not sister to the angios perms, thus refuting the Anthophyte Hypothesis.

TL;DR: It is proposed that ITS/ITS2 should be incorporated into the core barcode for seed plants, because in cases where it is difficult to amplify and directly sequence ITS in its entirety, just using ITS2 is a useful backup because it is easier to amplified and sequence this subset of the marker.

TL;DR: It is shown here that densely sampled taxon trees built with multiple genes provide an indispensable test of taxon-sparse trees inferred from genome sequences.

TL;DR: A review of the fossil history of seed plant genera that are now endemic to eastern Asia is given in this paper, where the majority of these are woody (with two exceptions), and most are today either broadly East Asian, or more specifically confined to Sino-Japanese subcategory rather than being endemic to the SinoHimalayan area.

TL;DR: The analyses indicate that eastern China represents a floristic museum, and western China an evolutionary cradle, for herbaceous genera; eastern China has served as both a museum and a cradle for woody genera, and areas of high species richness and phylogenetic diversity, and provide a foundation on which to build conservation efforts in China.