Evolution, 2023, XX(XX), 1–2 https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpad053 Advance access publication 28 March 2023 Digest Digest: Focus on chromosomes: how to understand angiosperm radiation Adrián Casanova Chiclana Department of Zoology, Genetics and Physical Anthropology, Faculty of Veterinary, University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Lugo, Spain Corresponding author: Department of Zoology, Genetics and Physical Anthropology, Faculty of Veterinary, University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Lugo ES-27002, Spain. Email: adrian.casanova@usc.es This article corresponds to Carta, A., & M. Escudero. (2023). Karyotypic diversity: a neglected trait to explain angiosperm diversifcation? Evolution, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/evolut/qpad014 Abstract How can the karyotypic diversity across angiosperms explain the diversification of this group? Using karyotypic data from around 15% of extant species, Carta and Escudero (2023) showed that changes in the chromosome number is one of the explanatory variables for species diversifi- cation along with other studied drivers, such as ecological adaptations. Species radiation is one of the major topics in evolutionary biology. In recent years, with new molecular methods and available data, we have increased our knowledge about the patterns and drivers associated with these evolutionary phe- nomena (de la Harpe et al., 2017), defning different evolu- tionary radiations beyond the adaptative ones (Simões et al., 2016). Several species radiations have been studied, the most famous being the Cambrian explosion, which resulted in a radical increase in global diversity (Na & Kiessling, 2015). After this, possibly one of the most intriguing radiations since Darwin’s time is that of fowering plants (angiosperms) during the Cretaceous period (Berendse & Scheffer, 2009). Beyond this evolutionary process, many diversifcation processes at lower taxonomic categories of angiosperms have also been investigated (Bengtson & Anderberg, 2018; Cavender-Bares, 2019). Received February 4, 2023; accepted March 24, 2023 © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Figure 1. Yearly genome submissions at NCBI database. Atypical genomes were excluded. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/data-hub/genome/ (last accession 10 March 2023). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/evolut/advance-article/doi/10.1093/evolut/qpad053/7091488 by guest on 07 April 2023