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Colonization of the Southern Hemisphere by Sagina and Colobanthus (Caryophyllaceae)

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Abstract

Colobanthus (23 species) and Sagina (30–33 species) together are sister to Facchinia. Whereas Facchinia is distributed in western Eurasia, Colobanthus is almost exclusively distributed in the Southern Hemisphere, and Sagina is distributed in both hemispheres with the highest species diversity in western Eurasia. We examined: 1. Whether Sagina and Colobanthus are monophyletic sister genera, 2. Where the two genera originated and how many times dispersal between hemispheres occurred, and 3. Which colonization routes between hemispheres were taken. We reconstructed the phylogeny of Colobanthus and Sagina using nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) and two plastid spacers (cpDNA) of altogether 158 ingroup samples of 45 species, and performed molecular dating and ancestral area reconstructions. Sagina and Colobanthus were confirmed as monophyletic sister genera. Biogeographical reconstructions based on ITS and cpDNA showed that Sagina reached the Southern Hemisphere in Australasia or in Africa. For Colobanthus, patterns were less clear and less well-supported: ITS showed Australasia as the region of entry, but cpDNA implied that the Southern Hemisphere may have been entered in America. The extant distributions and the biogeographical histories of Colobanthus and Sagina show both similarities and dissimilarities. This illustrates that biogeographical histories, even of closely related and ecologically very similar lineages, can be highly idiosyncratic.

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Availability of data and material

All sequences were uploaded on GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/), and vouchers are deposited in publicly accessible herbaria; GenBank accession numbers and herbarium voucher information are provided in Online Resource 1. Sequence alignments and tree-files are provided on TreeBASE (http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/study/TB2:S27886).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the AFROALP II team for collecting S. afroalpina at Mt. Kenya, and Berit Gehrke (Bergen, Norway) for sequencing and granting access to sequence data of the AFROALP II project. We thank Osvaldo J. Vidal for access to the HIP herbarium, and the curators and herbarium staff of AAS, ALA, BC, C, CANB, CIC, E, HIP, HO, JEPS, KHD, MJG, MICH, MONTU, OSC, P, RM, RNG, UC, W, WTU and WU for providing plant material for genetic analyses. Thanks to Bart van de Vijver for sampling two specimens in Île Amsterdam. We also would like to thank Marie Claire Veranso-Libalah (Mainz, Germany) for helping with the biogeographic analyses and Doris Franke (Mainz, Germany) for figure optimization. We acknowledge helpful comments by four anonymous reviewers of this and an earlier version of this paper.

Funding

EMB was funded by NERC‐CONICYT Grant NE/P003079/1 and Carlsberg Foundation Grant CF18‐0267.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

MSD and JWK designed the study. DMA, EMB and MSD generated the datasets and analysed the data. All authors wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Markus S. Dillenberger.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Handling editor: Mike Thiv.

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Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

606_2021_1793_MOESM1_ESM.xlsx

Online Resource file 1. Table of plant material used in this study, including voucher information and GenBank accession numbers

606_2021_1793_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

Online Resource file 2. Detailed description of data analysis for Sagina afroalpina from genome skimming data obtained in the AFROALP II project

606_2021_1793_MOESM3_ESM.pdf

Online Resource file 3. Additional phylogenetic trees and fully displayed phylogenies obtained from analyses with RAxML, MrBayes and BEAST

606_2021_1793_MOESM4_ESM.xlsx

Online Resource file 4. Table with full results of best-fitting models (with and without +J) in BioGeoBEARS for both datasets and both analyses

Information on electronic supplementary material

Information on electronic supplementary material

Online Resource 1. Table of plant material used in this study, including voucher information and GenBank accession numbers.

Online Resource 2. Detailed description of data analysis for Sagina afroalpina from genome skimming data obtained in the AFROALP II project.

Online Resource 3. Additional phylogenetic trees and fully displayed phylogenies obtained from analyses with RAxML, MrBayes and BEAST.

Online Resource 4. Table with full results of best-fitting models (with and without +J) in BioGeoBEARS for both datasets and both analyses.

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Alban, D.M., Biersma, E.M., Kadereit, J.W. et al. Colonization of the Southern Hemisphere by Sagina and Colobanthus (Caryophyllaceae). Plant Syst Evol 308, 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-021-01793-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00606-021-01793-w

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