Recently, the team of Wang Xiaoquan, a researcher at the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his collaborators have analyzed the evolutionary biology and ecology and other multidisciplinary methods to reveal the spatiotemporal evolutionary history and radiation evolution mechanism of the global Rhododendron
Chinese Academy of Sciences Radiation evolution or evolutionary radiation is a widely occurring mode of rapid species diversification, but its occurrence mechanism in the species-rich world-wide plant genus lacks in-depth research, especially how biological and environmental factors jointly drive evolutionary radiation.
Rhododendron is the largest woody plant genus in the northern hemisphere, and it is also a typical radiation evolution group, including thousands of species, of which about 860 species are distributed in the Himalayas-Hengduan Mountains and the Malay Islands
The researchers sampled 200 species representing all subgenus, groups, and almost all multi-species subgroups of Rhododendron, obtained 3437 orthologous nuclear genes through transcriptome sequencing, and used the tandem and ancestry of these genes Through analysis, the first high-resolution phylogenetic tree of this genus was constructed, and the reconstructed sub-genus and inter-group relationship were supported by the joint analysis of 38 maternally inherited chloroplast genes
Based on the obtained solid phylogenetic relationship of Rhododendron, combined with molecular clock measurement of species differentiation time, reconstruction of ancestral distribution area, diversification rate analysis, and fossil record, the researchers found that Rhododendron originated in the North in the Early Paleocene.
At the same time, the study analyzed 34 environmental factors in the four aspects of climate, soil, topography and land cover of the genus Rhododendron, and found that the two main ecological factors that determine the pattern of global species richness of this genus are altitude and The annual rainfall, the heterogeneity of the terrain caused by orogenic movement and the increase in annual precipitation caused by the strengthening of the Asian monsoon together drive the radiative differentiation of this genus in the Himalayas-Hengduan Mountains and the Malay Archipelago, and the uneven species diversification among geographical regions has led to The species diversity of East Asia is significantly higher than that of other regions
The researchers also measured and analyzed 7 traits of Rhododendrons, including leaf specific leaf area and leaf nitrogen content, and found that the adaptability of leaf functional traits further promoted the radiative evolution of the genus
This research provides a typical example for the evolutionary study of the genus of plants worldwide, and shows that lineage transcriptomics is a very efficient method in the reconstruction of the tree of plant life
The research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program, the Strategic Leading Science and Technology Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Frontier Science Key Research Project
Related paper information: https://doi.
https://doi.
org/10.
1093/molbev/msab314
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