Phylogenetic relationships among species of the subsection Dendrophlomis Bentham

Abstract

Abbreviations: AMOVA: analysis of molecular variance ITS: internal transcribed spacer PCR: polymerase chain reaction RAPDs: randomly amplified polymorphic DNA UPGMA: unweighted pair-group method with arithmetic averages This study used randomly amplified polymorphic DNA markers to determine genetic relationships among species of the subsection Dendrophlomis. Twenty accessions of the eleven Phlomis taxa were evaluated to determine genetic variability using fourteen ten mer primers selected from a 125 random oligonucleotide set. These 14 selected primers generated 85 RAPD bands that ranged in size from 200 to 1200 base pairs. Of the total bands, 88% (75) were polymorphic among the samples. Genetic distances among accessions were computed to produce a dendrogram based on UPGMA. Genetic distances ranged from 0.133 (between P. amanica and P. monocephala) to 0.494 (between P. chimerae and P. lunariifolia). The UPGMA tree based on distances has two major groups. The first comprised 9 taxa that were clustered into two subgroups. The first subgroup consisted of P. viscosa, P. lycia, P. amanica and P. monocephala while the second comprised P. lunariifolia, P. bourgaei, P. longifolia var. longifolia, P. grandiflora var. grandiflora and P. grandiflora var. fimbrilligera. The second group comprised 2 species, P. leucophracta and P. chimerae. Species-specific bands were observed for P. lycia, P. leucophracta, P. lunariifolia, P. bourgaei, P. chimerae and P. longifolia var longifolia. *Corresponding authorThe genus Phlomis L. comprises over 100 species including herbs, shrubs and sub-shrubs of the family Lamiaceae (Albaladejo et al. 2005). The genus is divided into two main sections, Phlomis and Phlomoides (Moench, 1794). Both sections are spread from the Mediterranean region to central Asia and China; but while species of the section Phlomoides occur mostly in central Asia and China, species of the section Phlomis appear mainly in the Mediterranean region. Turkey and Iran were indicated as the main centers of diversification in the Mediterranean region for the section Phlomis (Hedge, 1986). In particular, southern and eastern parts of the former and north-western part of the latter were proposed as centers of origin of that section. Nevertheless, Turkey has twice the number of species (34) and also nearly twice a higher endemism rate (57%) of species belonging to section Phlomis compared to Iran, where the numbers are 18% and 33% respectively (Hedge, 1986).Measurement of genetic variation within and between plant species is important for several reasons including delimitation of species, conservation of endangered species and construction of phylogenetic relationships among species. Several kinds of methods were used to measure levels and patterns of genetic variation, which range from Yüzbaşıoğlu, E. and Dadandı, M.Y.2 morphological characterization to various DNA-based markers such as restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLPs), randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPDs), amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLPs) ...