Brassicaceae is a large plant family of special interest; it includes many economically important crops, herbs, and ornamentals, as well as model organisms. The taxonomy of the Brassicaceae has long been controversial because of the poorly delimited generic boundaries and artificially circumscribed tribes. Despite great effort to delimitate species and reconstruct the phylogeny of Brassicaceae,...

The Pooideae are a highly diverse C3 grass subfamily that includes some of the most economically important crops, nested within the highly speciose core-pooid clade. Here, we build and explore the phylogeny of the Pooideae within a temporal framework, assessing its patterns of diversification and its chromosomal evolutionary changes in the light of past environmental transformations. We sequenc...

Background and aims – Pollination systems often reflect adaptations to specific groups of pollinators, these morphological specialisations have been important in the diversification angiosperms. Here, we study evolution capitulum pollination system pantropical genus Parkia, which comprises 35 species trees distributed largely forests South Central America, Africa, Madagascar, Indo-Pacific. The ...

Previous works resolved diverse phylogenetic positions for genera of the Fabaceae tribe Thermopsideae, without a thoroughly biogeography study. Based on sequence data from nuclear ITS and four cpDNA regions (matK, rbcL, trnH-psbA, trnL-trnF) mainly sourced from GenBank, the phylogeny of tribe Thermopsideae was inferred. Our analyses support the genera of Thermopsideae, with the exclusion of Pic...

DNA barcoding ("barcoding") has been proposed as a rapid and practical molecular method to identify species via diagnostic variation in short orthologous DNA sequences from one or a few universal genomic regions. It seeks to address in a rapid and simple way the "taxonomic impediment" of a greater need for taxonomic identifications than can be supplied by taxonomists. Using a complicated plant ...

Eastern Asia (EA) is a key region for the diversification of flowering plants in the Northern Hemisphere, but few studies have focused on the biogeographic history within EA in the context of the other northern continents. Polygonatum is an important medicinal genus widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere with its highest species richness in EA, and it represents an excellent model for st...

Bacterial group II introns encode maturase proteins required for splicing. In organelles of photosynthetic land plants, most of the group II introns have lost the reading frames for maturases. Here, we show that the plastidial maturase MatK not only interacts with its encoding intron within trnK-UUU, but also with six additional group II introns, all belonging to intron subclass IIA. Mapping an...