Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Jan 13;22(1):32.
doi: 10.1186/s12870-021-03413-8.

Plastid phylogenomics of tribe Perseeae (Lauraceae) yields insights into the evolution of East Asian subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forests

Tian-Wen Xiao  1   2 , Hai-Fei Yan  1 , Xue-Jun Ge  3   4
Affiliations

Plastid phylogenomics of tribe Perseeae (Lauraceae) yields insights into the evolution of East Asian subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forests

Tian-Wen Xiao et al. BMC Plant Biol. .

Abstract

Background: The East Asian subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forests (EBLFs) harbor remarkable biodiversity. However, their historical assembly remains unclear. To gain new insights into the assembly of this biome, we generated a molecular phylogeny of one of its essential plant groups, the tribe Perseeae (Lauraceae).

Results: Our plastid tree topologies were robust to analyses based on different plastid regions and different strategies for data partitioning, nucleotide substitution saturation, and gap handling. We found that tribe Perseeae comprised six major clades and began to colonize the subtropical EBLFs of East Asia in the early Miocene. The diversification rates of tribe Perseeae accelerated twice in the late Miocene.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the intensified precipitation in East Asia in the early Miocene may have facilitated range expansions of the subtropical EBLFs and establishment of tribe Perseeae within this biome. By the late Miocene, species assembly and diversification within the EBLFs had become rapid.

Keywords: Diversification rates; EBLFs; Tribe Perseeae.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there are no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Maximum likelihood tree of tribe Perseeae based on unpartitioned complete plastomes (CP). The support values of Shimodaira-Hasegawa-like approximate likelihood ratio test (SH-aLRT ≥ 80%; on the left) and ultrafast bootstrap (UFBS ≥ 95%; on the right) are shown on branches. “-” above branches indicate SH-aLRT < 80% and UFBS < 95%, respectively
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Combined diversification rate analyses and ancestral habitat reconstruction of tribe Perseeae. (a) Phylorate inferred from BAMM analysis with “ExpectedNumberofShifts” set to 1 and global sampling probability set to 0.135. (b) Ancestral habitat reconstructed by R package phytools with SYM model. Speciation rates (lineages per million years) are color-coded on branches in (a). Red circles in (a) indicates the position of speciation rate shift. Numbers in the circles near the nodes in (b) correspond to those node numbers listed in the main text and Fig. S11. The pie charts at the nodes represent the posterior probabilities of ancestral habitat types. Dated phylogeny of tribe Perseeae is derived from Fig. S11. Pl and Qu are abbreviations for Pliocene and Quaternary, respectively
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Speciation, extinction, and net diversification rates through time plots obtained from the BAMM analyses. (a) The global temperature change in the past 45 Ma is derived from Zachos et al. [113]. Plots (b), (c) and (d) are diversification rates for Perseeae, Machilus, and Perseeae without Machilus, respectively; speciation, extinction, and net diversification rates are colored in red, black, and green, respectively; the shaded areas denote 95% confidence intervals in rate reconstructions
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Slik JWF, Franklin J, Arroyo-Rodríguez V, Field R, Aguilar S, Aguirre N, et al. Phylogenetic classification of the world’s tropical forests. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2018;115(8):1837–1842. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Yang Y, Fujihara M, Li B, Yuan X, Hara K, Da L, et al. Structure and diversity of remnant natural evergreen broad-leaved forests at three sites affected by urbanization in Chongqing metropolis, Southwest China. Landsc Ecol Eng. 2014;10(1):137–149.
    1. Song Y-C. On the global position of the evergreen broad-leaved forests of China. In: Box EO, Peet RK, Masuzawa T, Yamada T, Fujiwara K, Maycock PF, editors. Vegetation science in forestry. Netherlands: Springer; 1995. pp. 69–84.
    1. Zhang J, Chu Z, Ge Y, Zhou X, Jiang H, Chang J, et al. TRIPLEX model testing and application for predicting forest growth and biomass production in the subtropical forest zone of China’s Zhejiang Province. Ecol Model. 2008;219(3):264–275.
    1. Mucina L. Biome: evolution of a crucial ecological and biogeographical concept. New Phytol. 2019;222(1):97–114. - PMC - PubMed