Phylogeny and diversification of Valerianaceae (Dipsacales) in the southern Andes

Phylogenetic insights into Andean plant diversification

“…1 Ma (Särkinen et al, 2013), probably associated with a shift to hummingbird pollination (Pérez et al, 2006). The divergence time estimates for Valeriana (Valerianaceae) by Bell et al (2012) are considerably higher (∼13 Ma). These authors suggest that Valeriana originated in the Southern Andes before final uplift, and that the group diversified into the higher elevations from either sides of the Andes once the Southern Andes reached their current elevation (see above).…”

Transcriptome Sequences Resolve Deep Relationships of the Grape Family

“…However, in spite of several recent efforts [2,3,5,6,7,8] that effectively resolved the relationships within each of the main clades, the deep relationships of the family remained poorly resolved. Recently, it has been demonstrated for a number of plant and animal lineages that uncertainty of deep relationships among taxonomic groups hinders progress in understanding their evolution including their temporal and spatial origins as well as their morphological changes over time [9,10]. In particular, biogeographic reconstructions, especially at the family level, are a major challenge for plant biologists [2,3,11–16], even though methods have been developed to account for phylogenetic uncertainty in biogeographic inferences [17–19].…”

A New Species of <I>Valeriana</I> from the Andean Region of Northwestern Argentina Based on Morphological and Molecular Data

“…The new sequences generated in our work were included in the matrix published by Bell et al (2012). Eighty-three accessions of Valerianaceae were included in the final analyses.…”

“…Two plastid loci, trnL-F intergenic spacer and trnK intron, were chosen to reconstruct the phylogeny of Valeriana. These two chloroplast markers were selected because they have the highest number of parsimony informative characters from nine markers previously utilized in Valerianaceae (Bell et al 2012). The information about primers for the trnL-F region and trnK intron, and details about PCR amplification can be found in Bell (2007).…”

“…Sequences were assembled and edited using the program Chromas Pro v. 1.41 (Technelysium Pty,South Brisbane,Australia), which was also used for checking the presence of single peaks in the chromatograms. The new sequences obtained were aligned manually by eye to a published data matrix for Valerianaceae (Bell et al 2012) using the program Bioedit v.7.0. 9.0 (Hall 1999).…”