A global plastid phylogeny of the brake fern genus Pteris (Pteridaceae) and related genera in the Pteridoideae

Abstract

The brake fern genus Pteris belongs to the Pteridaceae subfamily Pteridoideae. It contains 200-250 species distributed on all continents except Antarctica, with its highest species diversity in tropical and subtropical regions. The monophyly of Pteris has long been in question because of its great morphological diversity and because of the controversial relationships of the Australian endemic monospecific genus Platyzoma. The circumscription of the Pteridoideae has likewise been uncertain. Previous studies typically had sparse sampling of Pteris species and related genera and used limited DNA sequence data. In the present study, DNA sequences of six plastid loci of 146 accessions representing 119 species of Pteris (including the type of the genus) and 18 related genera were used to infer a phylogeny using maximum-likelihood, Bayesian-inference and maximum-parsimony methods. Our major results include: (i) the previous uncertain relationships of Platyzoma were due to long-branch attraction; (ii) Afropteris, Neurocallis, Ochropteris and Platyzoma are all embedded within a well-supported Pteris sensu lato; (iii) the traditionally circumscribed Jamesonia is paraphyletic in relation to a monophyletic Eriosorus; (iv) Pteridoideae contains 15 genera: Actiniopteris, Anogramma, Austrogramme, Cerosora, Cosentinia, Eriosorus, Jamesonia, Nephopteris (no molecular data), Onychium, Pityrogramma, Pteris, Pterozonium, Syngramma, Taenitis and Tryonia; and (v) 15 well-supported clades within Pteris are identified, which differ from one another on molecular, morphological and geographical grounds, and represent 15 major evolutionary lineages.

Embracing the pteridophyte classification of Ren‐Chang Ching using a generic phylogeny of Chinese ferns and lycophytes

“…The latter group shows an initial diversification in the Neotropics followed by several colonization events leading to radiations in the Old World tropics (Schneider et al, ; Sundue et al, ). Similar patterns have now been documented for many lineages of ferns including Aspleniaceae (Schneider et al, ), Athyriaceae (Wei et al, , ), Dryopteridaceae (e.g., Sessa et al, ; Zhang et al, ; Labiak et al, ), and Pteridaceae (e.g., Lu et al, ; Schneider et al, ; Chao et al, ; Zhang et al, ).…”

A community‐derived classification for extant lycophytes and ferns

“…Circumscription sensu Zhang et al (). Monophyletic (Schuettpelz et al, ; Zhang et al, ). 13 genera and an estimated 400 species.…”

A plastid phylogeny and character evolution of the Old World fern genus Pyrrosia (Polypodiaceae) with the description of a new genus: Hovenkampia (Polypodiaceae)

“…A comparison of the trees resulting from MPJK analyses of the individual plastid markers and the combined plastid dataset did not identify any well-supported conflicts in MP analyses (MPJK ! 70%; MasonGamer and Kellogg, 1996;Zhang and Simmons, 2006;Zhang et al, 2015Zhang et al, , 2016Zhou et al, 2016). The five plastid markers were therefore concatenated and analyzed in unison.…”

“…The rbcL sequences were amplified with primers F1 (Fay et al, 1997) and 1379R designed by Zurawski et al (1984). For some herbarium specimens with degraded DNA, the internal primers of the rbcL gene 595F (Le Péchon et al, 2016a, 2016b, 650R, 819R (Zhang et al, 2015;Le Péchon et al, 2016b), and 895R (Le Péchon et al, 2016a) were employed when amplification of the larger region was unsuccessful. The rps4 gene and rps4-trnS intergenic spacer were amplified with primers TRNS (Souza-Chies et al, 1997) and an unnamed primer derived from Li and Lu (2006).…”