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Brief Communication |
2Kasetsart University, Kamphaengsaen Campus, Nakhon Pathom, 73140 Thailand; and 3Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996 USA
Received for publication March 19, 2005. Accepted for publication November 23, 2005.
| ABSTRACT |
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Key Words: Asteraceae Eupatorieae Eupatorium ITS hybridization molecular phylogeny
| INTRODUCTION |
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Eupatorium in its current delimitation (King and Robinson, 1970
, 1987
) is a temperate genus of about 43 species with its greatest diversity in eastern North America, but it is also represented in eastern Asia (Kawahara et al., 1989
) and by a single species in Europe. A striking feature in eastern North America is the presence of species that are represented by a mixture of sexual diploids and agamospermous polyploids, the latter usually having much more extensive geographic ranges than the former (Grant, 1953
; Sullivan, 1976
). Efforts to assess whether the apomicts within such species are of auto- or alloploid origin have produced varying and sometimes inconclusive results to date (Sullivan, 1972
; Yahara and Sullivan, 1986
; Yahara, 1990
; Yahara et al., 1991
). There are also taxa that are entirely diploid and sexual, as well as others that are composed entirely of agamospermous, polyploid populations. Because the agamospermous taxa differ in morphology from known sexual diploids and may appear to be intermediate between them, a number of them have been proposed to be of hybrid origin.
Eupatorium godfreyanum is an entirely agamospermous species that has been proposed to combine genomes from E. sessilifolium L. and E. rotundifolium L. (Cronquist, 1985
). This taxon was long recognized under the name E. vaseyi Porter (E. sessilifolium L. var. vaseyi [Porter] Fernald & Griscom), but Cronquist (1985)
has documented that the type specimen of E. vaseyi is at variance with this usage and rather represents a likely hybrid derivative of E. album L. and E. sessilifolium. Eupatorium godfreyanum has a scattered geographic distribution, ranging from New Jersey to North Carolina and west to southern Ohio and West Virginia (Fig. 1). In both of its putative parents, mixed assemblages of sexual diploids and agamospermous polyploids, the polypoloids have achieved a widespread geographic distribution in eastern North America (Figs. 1, 2). In contrast, the sexual diploids of both are relatively restricted, with those of E. sessilifolium known from only a limited area in the southern Appalachian Mountains, whereas those of E. rotundifolium are confined to a relatively narrow band in southern Georgia and northern Florida (Figs. 1, 2; Sullivan, 1976
).
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| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
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Cloning of the ITS region from samples of E. godfreyanum was necessary because data obtained from direct sequencing of the PCR product were not satisfactory. Purified PCR products were ligated into pGEM-T (Promega) according to the manufacturer's instructions. Competent Top10 F' (Invitrogen, San Diego, California, USA) cells were transformed via electroporation, and the resulting colonies were screened for plasmids with inserts by PCR using the original amplification primers. Plasmids were isolated from a single recombinant colony using an alkaline lysis/PEG precipitation protocol (Sambrook et al., 1989
).
Data analysis
Phylogenetic relationships were analyzed using the maximum parsimony approach, implemented with the computer program PAUP* 4.0b10 (Swofford, 2003
). A heuristic search with 1000 random addition replicates and with tree-bisection-reconnection (TBR) branch swapping was used, with gaps treated as missing data. Bootstrap analysis (Felsenstein, 1985
) was performed with 1000 replicates using a heuristic search strategy.
| RESULTS |
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Samples of E. rotundifolium and E. sessilifolium differed consistently in ITS sequence by a minimum of 13 single base-pair substitutions and two single base-pair indels; because of the indels the ITS region was 2 bp longer in E. rotundifolium. The ITS sequences that were obtained for individual clones showed that the samples of E. godfreyanum each had at least two different ITS sequence motifs, one that matched closely those of E. rotundifolium and one that matched exactly that of E. sessilifolium. A clone from sample 823 produced a sequence that matched E. sessilifolium for the nine distinctive positions of the ITS-1 region but matched E. rotundifolium for the six distinctive positions of the ITS-2 region; it is likely that this sequence represents a PCR recombinant. The presence of ITS sequences of different lengths within each sample of E. godfreyanum explained why direct sequencing of PCR products produced unsatisfactory results.
Phylogenetic analyses
The data set that was used for parsimony analysis included 60 samples representing 28 species, and 118 potentially informative variable base positions as well as an additional 23 were variable but not parsimony informative. Parsimony analysis yielded 23583 minimum length trees of 243 steps with a consistency index of 0.71 and a retention index of 0.88. The consensus tree had almost identical topology to the bootstrap tree (Fig. 3). Samples of Eupatorium are separated from the outgroup, Eutrochium, with 100% bootstrap support. Within Eupatorium, a basal split separated samples of the dog fennel group ("Traganthes group") from the remainder of the data set. Above this basal split was a large polytomy, with species or groups of species forming strongly supported clades. A clade formed by the Eurasian species had weak (55%) bootstrap support, but the European (E. cannabinum) and Asiatic samples were each placed in clades that were individually well supported. For the North American samples, each species with multiple samples formed a strongly supported clade, but the only species grouping that received more than 50% bootstrap support was that of E. album and E. petaloideum. Note that the sample identified by Ito et al. (2000)
as E. sessilifolium was placed with our sample of E. semiserratum, and conversely their sample of E. semiserratum was placed with our samples of E. sessilifolium; our interpretation is that their data for the two species are reversed. The only species in the analysis that was not monophyletic was E. godfreyanum, and individual clones of this species were placed with either E. rotundifolium or E. sessilifolium (Fig. 3).
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| DISCUSSION |
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The molecular data thus are consistent with the supposed intermediacy in morphological features, which has been cited to support the hybrid origin of E. godfreyanum (Cronquist, 1985
). As has been noted to be the case for many hybrids and hybrid derivatives (Rieseberg, 1995
), the morphology of E. godfreyanum is not strictly intermediate between its putative parental species, but rather consists of a mixture of qualititative characters that match one or the other parental species as well as intermediacy in quantitative ones (Table 1).
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Although the molecular data for the genus was presented primarily to form a backdrop for analysis of E. godfreyanum, some notable aspects of the overall phylogenetic patterns in Eupatorium are evident. One is that the ITS data provide a perspective on the generic-level phylogeny, suggesting a basal split between the species with paniculate inflorescences and highly dissected leaves that have been recognized as the "Traganthes group" (the dog-fennels) and the remainder of the genus, a result that is fairly consistent with results of karyotype analyses (Watanabe et al., 1990
). Within the remainder of the genus, there was, however, little phylogenetic resolution based on ITS data. The lack of resolution suggests that divergence within the genus between Eurasia and North America occurred in a relatively short period, at approximately the same time as the species-level divergence in North America. A second notable aspect is the contrast between the levels of divergence of species for ITS in Eupatorium and those that have been reported for other genera of Asteraceae from eastern North America. The relatively large divergence in the ITS region between E. rotundifolium and E. sessilifolium (15 of 636 changes or a divergence of 3%) contrasts to near uniformity in ITS sequences between morphologically distinctive species such as Helianthus microcephalus/H. divaricatus (Schilling et al., 1998
), Liatris cylindracea/L. oligocephala (Hardig et al., 2005) and Solidago shortii/S. discoidea (Beck et al., 2004
). One potential explanation is that species of Eupatorium actually have relatively small population sizes (note that based on isozyme data, this has been suggested for E. altissimum, Yahara et al., 1991
), potentially subject to periodic bottlenecks, and thus sequence changes may undergo fixation at a relatively high rate.
| FOOTNOTES |
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The authors thank E. Lickey and E. Grand for help with fieldwork and G. Beattie, P. Heise, J. Miller, and R. Small for advice and technical support. Financial support was provided by the H. R. De Selm and L. H. Hesler Funds and the Department of Botany, University of Tennessee. ![]()
4Author for correspondence (e-mail: eschilling{at}utk.edu
) ![]()
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