Abstract Detail

Pteridology

Mendez-Reneau, Jonas [1], Sigel, Erin [2].

Species and gene-allele phylogenies resolve conserved lineages and hybrids in the hyper-variable Hawaiian endemic Polypodium pellucidum fern.

Endemic to the Hawaiian archipelago, the fern species Polypodium pellucidum comprises one form and three varieties that have striking morphological variation. The taxa have specific island and elevational distributions with variable overlap among them, suggesting a complex evolutionary history of biogeographical isolation and morphological divergence that was likely followed by hybridization. To date, phylogenetic investigation of this diverse species has been hampered by a lack of sampling of all known P. pellucidum taxa as well as a lack of informative molecular markers. Here, we employ the Genealogy of Flagellate Plants (GoFlag) target-capture (TC) probe set and the SORTED bioinformatic pipeline to recover hundreds of nuclear loci and chloroplast sequences for all P. pellucidum taxa. Based on nuclear and chloroplast phylogenies we identify conserved lineages within P. pellucidum and gain insight into their morphological variation and geographic distributions. Analysis of chloroplast sequences provides an alternative genomic region associated with the maternal lineages of samples, serving as a comparison to bi-parentally inherited nuclear data to identify lineages that were conserved in both as well as putative hybrid samples that have discordant placements in each phylogeny. We present preliminary nuclear and chloroplast phylogenies using the Multi-Species Coalescent (MSC) to make species trees in concert with analyses of phased allelic gene-trees under a Maximum-Likelihood framework. Our results reveal paraphyletic taxa under the current classification, and we present alternative conserved lineages within P. pellucidum as well as hybrids among them. We conclude by assessing morphologies in the conserved lineages we identified and how morphological characters in hybrids are inherited based on the phenotypes of their maternal and paternal progenitor lineages.

1 - University of Louisiana, Lafayette, 410 East St. Mary, Lafayette, LA, 70503, United States
2 - University of New Hampshire, Biology, 105 Main St, Durham, NH , 03824, USA

Keywords:
phylogenetics
hybridization
niche evolution
morphological evolution
Hawaiian Islands
ferns.

Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Session: PTR1, Pteridology I
Location: /
Date: Monday, July 19th, 2021
Time: 11:30 AM(EDT)
Number: PTR1007
Abstract ID:960
Candidate for Awards:Edgar T. Wherry award