Biologist discusses decoding the "platypus" of the plant kingdom

Biologist Victor Albert was interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered about his work analyzing the genome of the plant amborella. "It basically just looks like a small tree or shrub with fairly nondescript leaves and relatively nondescript flowers," he said, but the plant is important because it's one of the first flowering plants that evolved on Earth and while it is the sibling of all flowering plants, it has no direct descendents.