A molecular phylogeny of Hypnales (Bryophyta) inferred from ITS2 sequence-structure data

Abstract

BackgroundHypnales comprise over 50% of all pleurocarpous mosses. They provide a young radiation complicating phylogenetic analyses. To resolve the hypnalean phylogeny, it is necessary to use a phylogenetic marker providing highly variable features to resolve species on the one hand and conserved features enabling a backbone analysis on the other. Therefore we used highly variable internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) sequences and conserved secondary structures, as deposited with the ITS2 Database, simultaneously.FindingsWe built an accurate and in parts robustly resolved large scale phylogeny for 1,634 currently available hypnalean ITS2 sequence-structure pairs.ConclusionsProfile Neighbor-Joining revealed a possible hypnalean backbone, indicating that most of the hypnalean taxa classified as different moss families are polyphyletic assemblages awaiting taxonomic changes.

Phylogenetic position and delimitation of the moss family Plagiotheciaceae in the order Hypnales

“…; see also Cox et al ., ). Unlike earlier phylogenetic studies of Plagiotheciaceae (Hedenäs & Pedersen, ; Ignatov & Kuznetsova, ; Zuo et al ., ) or Hypnales (Tsubota et al ., ; Ignatov et al ., ; Cox et al ., ; Merget & Wolf, ; Huttunen et al ., ), the present article clarifies both the delimitation of the family and its position in Hypnales with strong support from molecular analyses, which might be attributed to insufficient sampling or to insufficient phylogenetic signal in the markers used in the earlier studies.…”

“…This radiation is assumed to be connected with ecological diversification and expansion into new habitats, such as epiphytic (Shaw et al, 2003;, although supporting evidence for this hypothesis is still lacking. As a result of this rapid radiation, branch lengths at deep nodes are short with low support in all published phylogenetic analyses (Tsubota et al, 2004;Cox et al, 2010;Merget & Wolf, 2010;Huttunen et al, 2012). Poor resolution at deep nodes makes it difficult to reconstruct the order of diversification events in the group, and relationships between hypnalean families have remained uncertain.…”

Asexual reproduction and protonemal developmentin vitroinFontinalis antipyreticaHedw.

“…Whether these ontogenetic characters are truly informative and at what hierarchical level(s) remains to be established. Given the major difficulties in resolving phylogenetic relationships within Hypnales (Shaw et al, 2003;Shaw & Renzaglia, 2004;Olsson et al, 2009) and the need for a reassignment of many classic pleurocarpous families (Merget & Wolf, 2010), the potential of these protonemal characters, including gemmae morphology and liberation mechanisms, should not be forgotten. The same applies to possible relationships between Orthotrichaceae and pleurocarps, the former sometimes considered to occupy an intermediate position in the gradual transformation to pleurocarpy, with cladocarpous Orthotrichaceae proposed as the possible sister to the pleurocarpous mosses (see Goffinet et al, 1998 andRenzaglia, 2004 andliterature therein).…”

Molecular Diversity of miR390-Guided Transacting siRNA Precursor Genes in Lower Land Plants: Experimental Approach and Bioinformatics Analysis

“…Totally, we investigated 11 Bryopsida moss species ( Table 1). Six of them belong to orders Hookeriales and Hypnales, which together comprise more than 25% of all known moss species [14]. Subclass Dicranidae (totally 4 species studied) was mainly represented by plants from order Grimmiales ( Figure 4 and Table 1).…”

“…(4), DNA size markers including bands ranging from 100 bp to 1000 bp with 100 bp step and 1500 bp band (Sibenzyme). (b) PCR products were obtained on genomic DNAs with the internal transcribed spacer-specific (ITS2-specific) primers [14] as a control of genomic DNA preparation quality. Lane numbering corresponds to those in (a).…”