Maple phylogeny and biogeography inferred from phylogenomic data

Abstract

Acer (the maple genus) is one of the diverse tree genera in the Northern Hemisphere with about 152 species, most of which are in eastern Asia. There are roughly a dozen species in Europe/western Asia and a dozen in North America. Several phylogenetic studies of Acer have been conducted since 1998, but none have provided a satisfactory resolution for basal relationships among sections of Acer. Here we report the first well‐resolved phylogeny of Acer based on DNA sequences of over 500 nuclear loci generated using the anchored hybrid enrichment method and explore the implications of the robust phylogeny for Acer systematics and biogeography. Our phylogenetic results support the most recent taxonomic treatment of Acer by de Jong with some modifications; section Pentaphylla may be expanded to include section Trifoliata, and A. yangbiense may be included in section Lithocarpa. Sections Spicata, Negundo, Arguta, and Palmata form a clade sister to the rest of the genus where sections Glabra and Parviflora comprise the first clade followed by section Macrantha, sections Ginnala, Lithocarpa, Indivisa, sections Platanoidea and Macrophylla, section Rubra, section Acer, and section Pentaphylla. Monotypic sections Glabra and Macrophylla in North America are sister to the Japanese section Parviflora and Eurasian section Platanoidea, respectively. Ancestral area inferences using statistical dispersal and vicariance analysis (S‐DIVA) and dispersal and extinction cladogenesis (DEC) methods suggest that Asia might be the most likely ancestral area of Acer as proposed by Wolfe and Tanai and molecular dating using Bayesian evolutionary analysis by sampling trees (BEAST) indicate that section diversifications of Acer might have completed largely in the late Eocene and the intercontinental disjunctions of Acer between eastern Asia and eastern North America formed mostly in the Miocene.

Plastome comparative genomics in maples resolves the infrageneric backbone relationships

“…There are three polyploid species in our study, and their discordant positions in the plastid and nuclear trees (Li et al, 2019) might indicate past hybridization and introgression. Acer rubrum is hexaploid and octoploid, whereas Acer carpinifolium and A. pseudoplatanus are both tetraploids (Contreras & Shearer, 2018).…”

“…A comparison with the phylogenomic analysis by Li et al (2019) based on nuclear sequences reveals very different topologies between the plastid and nuclear trees. In the nuclear tree, Acer species were grouped into two main lineages, one comprising members of sections Spicata, Palmata, Negundo and Arguta, and the other including the remaining sections.…”

Nuclear and Chloroplast Sequences Resolve the Enigmatic Origin of the Concord Grape

“…Much work remains to be done concerning the patterns of hybridization and introgression and their potential impact on North American Vitis taxonomy, conservation and utilization (Moore and Wen, 2016;Wen et al, 2018a). We will explore incongruence among these data and its likely mechanisms using a broader taxon sampling scheme and additional genes from both the nuclear and plastid genomes in the near future using the target enrichment approach (Weitemier et al, 2014;Wanke et al, 2017;Kleinkopf et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019;Nie et al, 2019). data analyses.…”

In memory of Professor Tang Yan‐Cheng: New perspectives in systematic and evolutionary biology

“…Two papers in this issue (Lindelof et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2020) shed new light on the evolutionary history of the eastern Asian-eastern North American (EA-ENA) pattern of geographic disjunction and the post-isolation evolution of disjunct lineages. The EA-ENA biogeographic disjunction has attracted recent attention in the phylogenomic era (e.g., Li et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019). Zhou et al (2020) conducted vigorous phylogenomic and divergence analyses using data generated from microfluid PCR and Fluidigm sequencing.…”