The Ancestral Angiosperm Genome Project (AAGP) is using a combination of Sanger, 454 and Illumina sequencing to characterize the transcriptomes of five phylogenetically critical, basal angiosperms: Amborella trichopoda, Aristolochia fimbriata, Liriodendron tulipifera, Nuphar advena, and Persea americana and one gymnosperm, Zamia vazquezii. These exemplar species will provide necessary data for inferring gene family size and transcriptome gene content in the most recent common ancestor of all extant angiosperm lineages.