How to Handle Speciose Clades? Mass Taxon-Sampling As a Strategy Towards Illuminating the Natural History of Campanula (Campanuloideae)
How to Handle Speciose Clades? Mass Taxon-Sampling as a Strategy towards Illuminating the Natural History of Campanula (Campanuloideae) Guilhem Mansion1*, Gerald Parolly1, Andrew A. Crowl2,8, Evgeny Mavrodiev2, Nico Cellinese2, Marine Oganesian3, Katharina Fraunhofer1, Georgia Kamari4, Dimitrios Phitos4, Rosemarie Haberle5, Galip Akaydin6, Nursel Ikinci7, Thomas Raus1, Thomas Borsch1 1 Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum, Freie Universita¨t Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 2 Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America, 3 Institute of Botany, National Academy of Sciences, Erevan, Armenia, 4 Department of Biology, University of Patras, Patras, Greece, 5 Biology Department, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington, United States of America, 6 Department of Biology Education, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey, 7 Department of Biology, Abant Izzet Baysal University, Bolu, Turkey, 8 Department of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America Abstract Background: Speciose clades usually harbor species with a broad spectrum of adaptive strategies and complex distribution patterns, and thus constitute ideal systems to disentangle biotic and abiotic causes underlying species diversification. The delimitation of such study systems to test evolutionary hypotheses is difficult because they often rely on artificial genus concepts as starting points. One of the most prominent examples is the bellflower genus Campanula with some 420 species, but up to 600 species when including all lineages to which Campanula is paraphyletic. We generated a large alignment of petD group II intron sequences to include more than 70% of described species as a reference. By comparison with partial data sets we could then assess the impact of selective taxon sampling strategies on phylogenetic reconstruction and subsequent evolutionary conclusions.
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