Current Status and Future Prospects for Fern and Lycophyte Genomics: Introduction to an American Fern Journal Special Issue

摘要

The past decade has ushered in a new era in the study of fern and lycophyte genomes. In 2011, the first nuclear genome of a lycophyte, Selaginella moellendorffii, was sequenced and assembled (Banks et al., 2011). It would take another seven years of technological advances and reduction in sequencing costs before the first nuclear genome assemblies for ferns were published in the summer of 2018 (Li et al., 2018). Additional Selaginella nuclear genomes have been sequenced and assembled with more on the way (VanBuren et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2018). Given these new resources, it seemed an appropriate time to ask how we got to this stage and where genomic research on ferns and lycophytes may go over the next few years.