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Recent Topics Posters

Holzmeyer, Laura [1], Duretto, Marco [2], Crayn, Darren [3], Jayanthan, Janani [3], Heslewood, Margaret [4], Hoerandl, Elvira [1], Appelhans, Marc [5].

A molecular phylogeny of Acronychia (Rutaceae) reveals first insights into its biogeographical patterns.

Acronychia (Rutaceae) is a genus of about 48 species distributed in S Asia, Malesia and Australasia. Its distribution ranges from India, southern China and Taiwan in the Northwest to the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and Lord Howe Island in the Southeast. Despite the rather large distribution, most species occur either in Eastern Australia (26 species/ 24 endemic) or New Guinea (20 species/ 19 endemic). Like its close relatives Melicope and Euodia, Acronychia is characterized by tetramerous flowers and simple or trifoliolate leaves with opposite phyllotaxis. Acronychia differs from these genera mainly by its drupaceous fruit (vs. follicular or capsular fruits in the other genera). Fruit morphology had been regarded as a main character for the definition of subfamilies within Rutaceae in most older classification systems (e.g. the Engler system) and Acronychia used to be placed in a different subfamily as Melicope and Euodia. We present here the first detailed phylogeny of Acronychia based on nuclear (ITS, ETS, NIAi3) and plastid markers (trnL-trnF, psbA-trnH). Our results show that Acronychia is only monophyletic if the genus Maclurodendron (6 species, SE Asia & Malesia) is merged into it. The vast majority of species are found in Eastern Australia and New Guinea, but not a single species occurs in both areas. This is surprising because the Torres Strait that divides both landmasses is only 150 km wide and land bridges were available repeatedly in the past millions of years during the evolution of Acronychia. The drupaceous fruits are attractive to birds, which are known to disperse Acronychia seeds. Our phylogenetic reconstruction confirms the strict separation of the Australian and New Guinean species. The sampled Australian species form two exclusively Australian subclades, which are the early-branching subclades of the Acronychia phylogeny. Two other subclades exist in the phylogeny, of which one is exclusively New Guinean and the other contains the few widespread species (New Guinea and further westward) and the genus Maclurodendron.


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1 - University of Goettingen, Department of Systematic Botany, Untere Karspuele 2, Goettingen, 37073, Germany
2 - National Herbarium of New South Wales, Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain , Sydney , NSW, 2000, Australia
3 - James Cook University, Australian Tropical Herbarium, Cairns, Queensland, 4870, Australia
4 - National Herbarium of New South Wales, Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain , Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia
5 - Goettingen University, Department of Systematic Botany, Untere Karspuele 2, Goettingen, Lower Saxony, 37073, Germany

Keywords:
Rutaceae
Phylogeny
Biogeography
Australasia.

Presentation Type: Recent Topics Poster
Session: P
Location: /
Date: Monday, July 28th, 2014
Time: 5:30 PM
Number: PRT001
Abstract ID:1237
Candidate for Awards:None


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