Ancestral State Reconstruction Reveals Rampant Homoplasy of Diagnostic Morphological Characters in Urticaceae, Conflicting with Current Classification Schemes.

ABSTRACT: Urticaceae is a family with more than 2000 species, which contains remarkable morphological diversity. It has undergone many taxonomic reorganizations, and is currently the subject of further systematic studies. To gain more resolution in systematic studies and to better understand the general patterns of character evolution in Urticaceae, based on our previous phylogeny including 169 accessions comprising 122 species across 47 Urticaceae genera, we examined 19 diagnostic characters, and analysed these employing both maximum-parsimony and maximum-likelihood approaches. Our results revealed that 16 characters exhibited multiple state changes within the family, with ten exhibiting >eight changes and three exhibiting between 28 and 40. Morphological synapomorphies were identified for many cla

SUBMITTER: Wu ZY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4631448 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature