Magdy Alabady, Senior Research Scientist in Plant Biology, and his research group have produced a high-quality, chromosome-level genome of the American pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea. 

Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants that occur across North America in nutrient-poor soils. They have evolved pitchers as modified leaves to trap and digest insects as a nitrogen source. These hollow pitchers fill naturally with rainwater and insects crawl into the pitcher, where stiff, downward pointing hairs prevent them from leaving. Some insects fall into the water at the base of the pitcher, where digestive enzymes secreted by the plant digest the insects before their nutrients are absorbed. A community of microorganisms eventually develops in the water at the base of the pitchers. These microorganisms live on the nutrients of the decaying insects, and may actually increase the nutrients available to the plant by further digesting its prey.*

The new pitcher plant genome offers a powerful new resource for studying the evolution of carnivorous plants. One of the important insights of this work is that key traits for insect capture and nutrient uptake arose ~ 80 mya through expansion and modification of existing gene families, rather than entirely new genes. These insights establish a critical foundation for future studies on plant–microbe interactions and ecosystem function of pitcher plants.

This research project was initiated in collaboration with the late Russell Malmberg and was published on March 23rd in The Plant Genome Journal: https://doi.org/10.1002/tpg2.70221Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

*With purple pitcher plant information adapted from the US Forest Service.