The role of wood anatomy in phylogeny reconstruction of Ericales

Abstract

The systematic significance of wood anatomical characters within Ericales is evaluated using separate and combined parsimony analyses including 23 wood characters and 3945 informative molecular characters. Analyses of wood features alone result in poorly resolved and conflicting topologies. However, when pedomorphic character states are coded as inapplicable, the combined bootstrap topology results in an increase of resolution and support at most deeper nodes compared with the molecular analyses. This suggests that phylogenetic information from the limited number of morphological characters is not completely swamped by an overwhelming amount of molecular data. Based on the morphology of vessels and fibers, and the distribution of axial parenchyma, two major wood types can be distinguished within Ericales: (i) a ''primitive'' type, nearly identical to the wood structure in the more basal outgroup Cornales, which is likely to have persisted in one major clade, and (ii) a ''derived'' type that must have evolved in at least two separate evolutionary lines. The occurrence of the first type is strongly correlated with shrubs to small trees growing in cold temperate or tropical montane regions, while the second type is common in tall trees of tropical lowlands. This favors the inclusion of ecologically adaptive features in phylogeny reconstruction.

Stem Anatomy and the Evolution of Woodiness in Piperales

“…7B, node 5). Previous works have suggested possible reversals in perforation plate morphology in a large clade of Ericales and in the genus Meryta (Lens et al 2007;Oskolski and Jansen 2009). These previously documented reversals from simple to scalariform perforation plates together with the observed widespread occurrence of scalariform perforation plates along all major groups of angiosperms (Olson 2014) challenge the vision of irreversibility of the Baileyan trend in perforation plate morphology and suggest that parallelisms and reversals resulting in scalariform perforation plates may be more common than previously thought.…”

Insular Woodiness on the Canary Islands: A Remarkable Case of Convergent Evolution

“…Furthermore, we searched for wood anatomical features with protracted juvenilism in 23 wood anatomical papers and in original sections of wood samples that we collected during our Tenerife expedition in spring 2011. The sections were made according to a previously described standard protocol (Lens et al 2007). Our sections were screened for the presence of an abundance of upright and square cell shapes of ray cells and for flat or decreasing length-on-age curves for vessel elements, two wood characters that are frequently used to point to secondarily woody taxa ( fig.…”

First record of Styracoxylon (Styracaceae) from Southern Hemisphere: Arroyo Feliciano Formation (Upper Pleistocene), Entre Ríos, Argentina

“…A "derived" type with in radial multiple vessels and the tendency to alternate intervessel pitting; that must have evolved in at least two separate evolutionary lines. The members of the "primitive" wood type grow in tropical montane or more temperate to artic regions while the tropical lowland species possess a "derived" wood type (Lens et al, 2007).…”