Population structure and historical biogeography of European Arabidopsis lyrata

Using Chloroplast trnF Pseudogenes for Phylogeography in Arabidopsis Lyrata

“…P-TR 11 and 12 differ from the previously reported P-TR 1 [11] by two alternative single point mutations (Table 4). In total, 12 distinct P-TR haplotypes were recognised when our new data was combined with the existing European study of Ansell et al [11,12] and the resulting minimum spanning network had two star-shaped clades (Figure 1), with all eastern North American samples restricted to clade 1. In European the P-TR 1 was found from a single population [11] at Vöslauer Hütte in Austria.…”

“…The probability of length changes taking place in tandem repeats increases with increasing numbers of repeats [26], and consequently copy losses are more likely than gains when long TA exist, hence we consider a six copied state as more-likely ancestral. Tandem arrays with three or six copies appear to be the most common across a variety of species [9,11,12,14,21]. Table 2.…”

“…Earlier analyses of Arabidopsis pseudogene variation detected complex patterns of parallel length change among trnF haplotypes [11][12][13] and so focused on the sequence 5' to the pseudogene copy region (pre-tandem repeat region). This system was used to study the phylogeography of European populations of Arabidopsis lyrata [11,12], which were considered as A. lyrata ssp.…”

“…Since the development of universal primers [10] the non-coding trnL (UAA)-trnF(GAA) intergenic spacer region (trnL-F IGS) of the chloroplast genome has been extensively utilized for plant evolutionary analysis [9,[11][12][13][14] (Appendix 2). In the Brassicaceae, the trnL-F region from at least 20 genera has been documented to contain multiple copies of a duplicated trnF pseudogene [11,13,14].…”

“…This system was used to study the phylogeography of European populations of Arabidopsis lyrata [11,12], which were considered as A. lyrata ssp. petraea [19].…”