A milestone in resolving the polyploid paradoxOA

The evolutionary significanceof whole-genome duplication(WGD),or polyploidy,has long been one of the central questions in plant evolutionary biology.For more than a century,researchers have grappled with the“polyploid paradox”:although polyploid organisms are widespread in nature,only a limited number of ancient WGD events have persisted over evolutionary timescales(Van de Peer et al.,2017;Carretero-Paulet and Van de Peer,2020).In this context,the recent study by Chen et al.(2026)of Van de Peer Lab in Cell provides compelling genomic evidence for when and why polyploid lineages became established,marking an important step toward resolving this long-standing paradox(Chen et al.,2026).