Multiple species of wild tree peonies gave rise to the 'king of flowers', Paeonia suffruticosa Andrews.

ABSTRACT: The origin of cultivated tree peonies, known as the 'king of flowers' in China for more than 1000 years, has attracted considerable interest, but remained unsolved. Here, we conducted phylogenetic analyses of explicitly sampled traditional cultivars of tree peonies and all wild species from the shrubby section Moutan of the genus Paeonia based on sequences of 14 fast-evolved chloroplast regions and 25 presumably single-copy nuclear markers identified from RNA-seq data. The phylogeny of the wild species inferred from the nuclear markers was fully resolved and largely congruent with morphology and classification. The incongruence between the nuclear and chloroplast trees suggested that there had been gene flow between the wild species. The comparison of nuclear and chloroplast phylogenies in

SUBMITTER: Zhou SL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4240985 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature