“…Gielly and Taberlet (1994, p. 774) wrote: ''it is not easy, for many reasons, to establish a rule for the choice of a particular region of the chloroplast genome for resolving phylogenies.'' While many authors have compared relative rates of evolution among a few noncoding regions (Sang et al, 1997;Small et al, 1998;Wang et al, 1999;Kusumi et al, 2000;Xu et al, 2000;Soltis et al, 2001;Cronn et al, 2002;Mast and Givnish, 2002;Hamilton et al, 2003;Perret et al, 2003;Sakai et al, 2003;Yamane et al, 2003), these studies are all of a relatively narrow phylogenetic context and there is no consensus as to variability in evolutionary rates among noncoding cpDNA regions across a broad phylogenetic range. To our knowledge, the only work that has attempted to compare levels of variation among several different noncoding cpDNA regions across a wide range of lineages is Aoki et al (2003).…”