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Molecular phylogeography of Fagus engleriana (Fagaceae) in subtropical China: limited admixture among multiple refugia

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Abstract

Beech is one of the most important trees in the temperate and subtropical forests of the Northern Hemisphere. Despite Chinese beeches have the particularity that only grow in subtropical areas, they have received few phylogeographic research. In this study, we sampled 25 populations of the northernmost-distributed Chinese beech, Fagus engleriana, and detected six haplotypes across 350 individuals by using sequences of two chloroplast intergenic spacers. The chloroplast genetic diversity was relatively low (h T = 0.659), with most genetic variance residing among populations (G ST = 0.831, N ST = 0.855, G ST≈N ST). SAMOVA analysis indicated that populations clustered into six groups with little admixture among them (most groups were characterized by a unique hapotype). Pairwise difference among haplotypes and Fu’s Fs statistic indicated that populations of F. engleriana have not experienced recent sudden expansions. Both the phylogeographic and demographic patterns found in this study suggest that F. engleriana remained fragmented in multiple refugia throughout the Pleistocene climatic changes, and experienced limited both glacial and interglacial/postglacial expansion. The results of this study imply that long-term isolation among multiple refugia, coupled with little admixture among populations of different refugia provided numerous opportunities for population divergence and allopatric speciation, which might be a driving factor for the exceptionally broad temperate species diversity in southern China.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr. Deng-Mei Fan for her help in drawing the haplotype distribution map. This study was funded by a project of National Science Foundation of China (30760016) and the Cultivation Program for Young Scientists of Jiangxi Province (grants to Zhi-Yong Zhang, 2008DQ01500).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Subtropical Biodiversity, Jiangxi Agricultural University, 330045, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China

    Ming Lei, Zhen-Jian Wu & Zhi-Yong Zhang

  2. Key Laboratory of Biodiversity and Biogeography, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, 650204, Yunnan, China

    Qun Wang & De-Zhu Li

  3. The Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Qun Wang

  4. Botanic Institute of Barcelona (IBB-CSIC-ICUB), Passeig del Migdia s/n, 08038, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Jordi López-Pujol

  5. Laboratori de Botànica, Facultat de Farmàcia, Universitat de Barcelona, Avda. Joan XXIII s/n, 08028, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

    Jordi López-Pujol

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  1. Ming Lei
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  2. Qun Wang
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  3. Zhen-Jian Wu
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  4. Jordi López-Pujol
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  5. De-Zhu Li
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Correspondence to De-Zhu Li or Zhi-Yong Zhang.

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Communicated by A. Kremer

Ming Lei and Qun Wang are co-first authors.

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Lei, M., Wang, Q., Wu, ZJ. et al. Molecular phylogeography of Fagus engleriana (Fagaceae) in subtropical China: limited admixture among multiple refugia. Tree Genetics & Genomes 8, 1203–1212 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11295-012-0507-6

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