Two papers from the Amborella genome project were just published in Science. Amborella, as the sister group to all other living flowering plants, serves as an evolutionary reference for studies of the genes, genomes, and other features of all other flowering plants, and the first paper reports the genome sequence and initial analyses of its structure and evolution. The project team features many folks from our program, notably Srikar, Andre, Brad, Doug, and Pam (and former program members Solon, Xinshuai, and Brandon), as well as other colleagues at UF (Matias Kirst and Juan Acosta). The UF team led the second paper, which presents a new approach for assembling and validating the genome of a non-model organism. What a wonderful accomplishment. Congratulations to the Ambo team! Please see Science 20 December 2013: 1516-1517