Publications by authors named "Angela McDonnell"

Article Synopsis
  • Angiosperms are vital for ecosystems and human life, making it important to understand their evolutionary history to grasp their ecological dominance.
  • The study builds an extensive tree of life for about 8,000 angiosperm genera using 353 nuclear genes, significantly increasing the sampling size and refining earlier classifications.
  • The findings reveal a complex evolutionary history marked by high gene tree conflict and rapid diversification, particularly during the early angiosperm evolution, with shifts in diversification rates linked to global temperature changes.
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Oenothera sect. Calylophus is a North American group of 13 recognized taxa in the evening primrose family (Onagraceae) with an evolutionary history that may include independent origins of bee pollination, edaphic endemism, and permanent translocation heterozygosity. Like other groups that radiated relatively recently and rapidly, taxon boundaries within Oenothera sect.

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Premise: Evolutionary studies require solid phylogenetic frameworks, but increased volumes of phylogenomic data have revealed incongruent topologies among gene trees in many organisms both between and within genomes. Some of these incongruences indicate polytomies that may remain impossible to resolve. Here we investigate the degree of gene-tree discordance in Solanum, one of the largest flowering plant genera that includes the cultivated potato, tomato, and eggplant, as well as 24 minor crop plants.

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Premise: Five to six percent of angiosperm species exhibit a dioecious sexual system, with unisexual "male" or "female" flowers borne on separate plants. The consequent need for inter-individual pollen exchange is a special challenge for taxa where pollen is the sole pollinator reward. Dioecious Australian Solanum assure visits from pollen-foraging bees via production of inaperturate pollen in functionally female (morphologically bisexual) flowers.

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Premise: Divergence depends on the strength of selection and frequency of gene flow between taxa, while reproductive isolation relies on mating barriers and geographic distance. Less is known about how these processes interact at early stages of speciation. Here, we compared population-level differentiation in floral phenotype and genetic sequence variation among recently diverged Castilleja to explore patterns of diversification under different scenarios of reproductive isolation.

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Article Synopsis
  • Botanical staff at academic institutions face challenges in managing plant pests in small greenhouses and can benefit from integrated pest management (IPM) strategies, but examples in literature are scarce.
  • A successful IPM program was developed over several years in two research greenhouses, utilizing a variety of controls including predatory insects to promote sustainable pest management.
  • While IPM can maintain healthy plant populations, it necessitates dedicated time and funding, which can lead to beneficial outcomes for faculty research and student education.
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A bush tomato that has evaded classification by solanologists for decades has been identified and is described as a new species belonging to the Australian " group" of the Ord Victoria Plain biogeographic region in the monsoon tropics of the Northern Territory. Although now recognised to be andromonoecious, Martine & McDonnell, exhibits multiple reproductive phenotypes, with solitary perfect flowers, a few staminate flowers or with cymes composed of a basal hermaphrodite and an extended rachis of several to many staminate flowers. When in fruit, the distal rachis may abcise and drop.

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The dioecious and andromonoecious Solanum taxa (the "S. dioicum group") of the Australian Monsoon Tropics have been the subject of phylogenetic and taxonomic study for decades, yet much of their basic biology is still unknown. This is especially true for plant-animal interactions, including the influence of fruit form and calyx morphology on seed dispersal.

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Premise Of The Study: We provide the largest phylogenetic analyses to date of Apocynaceae in terms of taxa and molecular data as a framework for analyzing the evolution of vegetative and reproductive traits.

Methods: We produced maximum-likelihood phylogenies of Apocynaceae using 21 plastid loci sampled from 1045 species (nearly 25% of the family) and complete plastomes from 73 species. We reconstructed ancestral states and used model comparisons in a likelihood framework to analyze character evolution across Apocynaceae.

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Premise Of The Study: Hyb-Seq, the combination of target enrichment and genome skimming, allows simultaneous data collection for low-copy nuclear genes and high-copy genomic targets for plant systematics and evolution studies. •

Methods And Results: Genome and transcriptome assemblies for milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) were used to design enrichment probes for 3385 exons from 768 genes (>1.6 Mbp) followed by Illumina sequencing of enriched libraries.

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