Molecular systematic studies in the genus Glaucium (Papaveraceae)

Abstract

Glaucium is mainly distributed from Atlantic Europe to Central Asia. The genus comprises two sections and 23 species: sect. Acropetala Mory with four species, four subspecies and two varieties and sect. Glaucium with 19 species, eight subspecies and 16 varieties. Species identification is fundamentally important within the fields of biology, biogeography, ecology and conservation. There are 10 species including 4 subspecies and 14 varieties of Glaucium in Iran. Taxonomy and phylogeny of the genus is highly complicated and controversial. The present study was done by use of phenetic analyses of morphological characters as well as Bayesian analyses of molecular data (ITS sequences) to illustrate the species relationships, taxonomic classification, monophyly versus paraphyly of the species in the genus Glaucium. We used ten Glaucium species for molecular studies, of which, nrDNA, ITS sequences were newly obtained for 7 species. The molecular analysis, based on successive reweighting by rescaled consistency index, revealed that Maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian methods gave very similar results based on ITS dataset. In general, the present study revealed that the species could be differentiated by morphological characters. PCA and cluster analysis (Ward?s method) carried out for morphological traits divided the Glaucium species in to two cluster. Phylogenetic relationships within Glaucium are known and ITS-based phylogenetic trees and morphological characters were in concordance.