Widespread genome duplications throughout the history of flowering plants

A birth-death model is developed to identify evidence for genome duplications in EST data and a mixture model is applied to estimate the age distribution of paralogous pairs identified in EST sets for species representing the basal-most extant flowering plant lineages. Evidence is found for episodes of ancient genome-wide duplications in the basal angiosperm lineages including Nuphar advena and the magnolilds Persea americana, Liriodendron tullpifera and Saruma henryl.