Phylogeographic patterns of the desert poplar in Northwest China shaped by both geology and climatic oscillations.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The effects of historical geology and climatic events on the evolution of plants around the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau region have been at the center of debate for years. To identify the influence of the uplift of the Tianshan Mountains and/or climatic oscillations on the evolution of plants in arid northwest China, we investigated the phylogeography of the Euphrates poplar (Populus euphratica) using chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) sequences and nuclear microsatellites, and estimated its historical distribution using Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM).

Results

We found that the Euphrates poplar differed from another desert poplar, P. pruinosa, in both nuclear and chloroplast DNA. The low clonal diversity in both populations reflected the low regeneration rate by seed/seedlings

SUBMITTER: Zeng YF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5970483 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature