Within-population Genetic Diversity of Climbing Plants and Trees in a Temperate Forest in Central Chile
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: The climbing habit is a key innovation in angiosperm evolution: climbing plant taxa have greater species richness than their non-climbing sister groups.It is considered that highly diversified clades should show increased among-population genetic differentiation.Less clear is the expected pattern regarding within-population genetic diversity in speciose lineages.We tested the hypothesis of greater within-population genetic diversity in climbing plants compared to trees in a temperate forest in central Chile.The assumption underlying this hypothesis is that higher among-population differentiation in climbers compared to trees should reflect higher genetic diversity as well.AFLP markers from 167 individual plants from 14 species (seven climbers and seven trees) were used to estimate the following indices of within-population genetic diversity: mean unbiased expected heterozygosity (H E ), percentage of polymorphic loci (PPL), Shannon information index (I), and the effective number of alleles (N E ).Overall, within-population genetic diversity did not differ between climbing plants and trees.The H E for climbing plants was slightly higher than that of trees (0.247 vs. 0.231), and PPL was higher in trees (93.6) than in climbers (81.8), but these differences were not statistically significant.Both I and N E were very similar for both groups.The expected greater genetic diversity in climbers might have been counterbalanced by tree-related ecological factors that turned to be relevant in the species assemblages studied.Results of this preliminary study should be further confirmed with a broader approach including several forest sites and larger sample sizes.
Source: Gayana. Botánica
Language: English
Subfield: Genetics
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,000
OpenAlex ID: W2023985813