Assessment of phylogenetic relationships is an important component of any successful crop improvement programme, as wild relatives of the crop species often carry agronomically beneficial traits. Since its domestication in East Africa, Eleusine coracana (2n = 4x = 36), a species belonging to the genus Eleusine (x = 8, 9, 10), has held a prominent place in the semi-arid regions of India, Nepal a...

The introduced Fucus evanescens (hermaphroditic) and the native F. serratus (dioecious) have been in secondary contact along the Danish coast of the Kattegat Sea for 60-100 years and dioecious hybrids have been observed at Blushøj for several years. Hybridization in Fucus is unusual because it appears to always involve a hermaphroditic and a dioecious parental pair. We determined the degree and...

A genus-wide molecular phylogeny for Polystichum and allied genera (Dryopteridaceae) was reconstructed to address the biogeographic origin and evolution of the three Hawaiian Polystichum species, all endemic there. The analysis was based on the cpDNA sequences rbcL and the trnL-F spacer from a taxonomically and geographically diverse sample. Parsimony and Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of the c...

In phylogenetic analyses of nuclear ITS and chloroplast trnL DNA sequences, the mostly endemic Australian genera; Halosarcia, Pachycornia, Sclerostegia, Tecticornia, and Tegicornia of the subfamily Salicornioideae (Chenopodiaceae) together form a monophyletic group, congruent with the hypothesis that they evolved from a common ancestor. However, limited genetic differentiation evident in both n...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Farfugium (Asteraceae) is a small genus that contains the two species F. japonicum and F. hiberniflorum and is distributed along a long archipelago in east Asia. The common taxon, F. japonicum, includes three varieties associated with a wide range of habitats, including forest understorey (sciophytes), coastal crag (heliophytes) and riverbed (rheophytes). Leaf shape is an im...

Based on nuclear and chloroplast sequences we resolve species relationships in Calycanthaceae and develop a biogeographic hypothesis that explains their intercontinental disjunctions and intra-continental diversification in eastern Asia. Fossil-calibrated penalized likelihood and Bayesian divergence time estimates indicate that the Northern Hemisphere Calycanthus and Chimonanthus diverged from ...