Inferring putative ancient whole genome duplications in the 1000 Plants (1KP) initiative: access to gene family phylogenies and age distributions

Polyploidy or whole genome duplications (WGDs) repeatedly occurred during green plant evolution. To examine the evolutionary history of green plants in a phylogenomic framework, the 1KP project sequenced over 1000 transcriptomes across the Viridiplantae. The 1KP project provided a unique opportunity to study the distribution and occurrence of WGDs across the green plants. In the 1KP capstone analyses, we used a total evidence approach that combined inferences of WGDs from Ks and phylogenomic methods to infer and place ancient WGDs. Overall, 244 putative ancient WGDs were inferred across the Viridiplantae. Here, we describe these analyses and evaluate the consistency of the WGD inferences by comparing them to evidence from published syntenic analyses of plant genome assemblies. We find that our inferences are consistent with whole genome synteny analyses and our total evidence approach may minimize the false positive rate throughout the data set. Given these resources will be useful for many future analyses on gene and genome evolution in green plants, we release 383,679 nuclear gene family phylogenies and 2,306 gene age distribution (Ks) plots from the 1KP capstone paper.