The Mexican flora as a case study in systematics: a meta-analysis of GenBank accessions

Abstract

Mexico has over 23,300 vascular plant species, half of which are endemic, and ranks third in species richness in the Americas. Compiling checklists and floras, and examining phylogenetic relationships are the ways we develop a better understanding of species richness. The plant checklist and the metadata of the sequences in GenBank can help determine how well represented Mexico’s vascular flora is, using the taxonomic and systematic studies done in Mexico and internationally. We formulated eight questions related to biological aspects, bibliometric indicators, methods, and the markers used in phylogenetic studies for species distributed in Mexico. The list of Mexico’s vascular species published in taxonomy and systematics articles was used to extract GenBank’s metadata using Datataxa. The selection, filtering, and descriptive statistics were obtained with scripts designed for this study. We found that 12,589 species have sequence records in GenBank, published in 3,807 articles. The journal Systematic Botany has more than 400 publications. The number of authors ranges from 1 to 6. Average impact factor was 1.64. Magnoliophyta, Poales, and Poaceae have the highest number of published articles. Parsimony and ITS are the most widely used method and marker, respectively. We explore the importance of Mexico as a biological repository for understanding the evolution of plants in global science. This is the first study on the importance of a country’s flora in phylogenetic work. Numerous groups and endemic species lack sequencing data that could contribute to the resolution of different lineages in the phylogeny.