Since their introduction two years ago, a series of universal primers designed to amplify and sequence large regions of the plastid genome -- approximately 10% of the ca. 150 kb land-plant plastome spanning, around 17 genes -- have been used to generate large volumes of high quality (very slowly evolving) characters across a broad range of seed plants. This relatively inexpensive and rapid approach is complementary to traditional "few-gene, multi taxon" and ongoing "whole genome" approaches. The primers have been used to produce phylogenies of a broad range of early and recent branches of plant evolution, many aspects of which have eluded robust phylogenetic resolution using conventional approaches. The "universality" of the primers has now been demonstrated across a broad range of vascular plant taxa. We provide an overview of published and upcoming work using this approach that addresses higher-order relationships at a variety of levels in the seed-plants, basal angiosperms and monocots. A number of incidental structural markers (small indels, intron losses and ORF expansion events) in the regions examined are shown to act as additional conservative markers of phylogeny. We also discuss how this diverse sampling of coding and noncoding regions provides substantial leverage to examine the molecular evolution of the plastid genome across a diverse range of seed plants.

Key words: angiosperms, deep phylogeny, monocotyledons, spermatophytes, Universal primers