Few studies have investigated bacterial community succession and the role of bacterial decomposition over a continuum of wood decay. Here, we identified how (i) the diversity and abundance of bacteria changed along a chronosequence of decay in (bigtooth aspen); (ii) bacterial community succession was dependent on the physical and chemical characteristics of the wood; (iii) interspecific bacterial interactions may mediate community structure. Four hundred and fifty-nine taxa were identified through Illumina sequencing of amplicons from samples taken along a continuum of decay, representing standing dead trees, downed wood, and soil.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPinus albicaulis (whitebark pine) is a widely-distributed but rapidly declining high elevation western North American tree and a candidate for listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Hybridization is observed in many eukaryotic lineages and can lead to the formation of polyploid species. The study of hybridization and polyploidization faces challenges both in data generation and in accounting for population-level phenomena such as coalescence processes in phylogenetic analysis. Genus Fragaria is one example of a set of plant taxa in which a range of ploidy levels is observed across species, but phylogenetic origins are unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) inhabits an expansive range in western North America, and it is a keystone species of subalpine environments. Whitebark is susceptible to multiple threats - climate change, white pine blister rust, mountain pine beetle, and fire exclusion - and it is suffering significant mortality range-wide, prompting the tree to be listed as 'globally endangered' by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and 'endangered' by the Canadian government. Conservation collections (in situ and ex situ) are being initiated to preserve the genetic legacy of the species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: As it becomes increasingly possible to obtain DNA sequences of orthologous genes from diverse sets of taxa, species trees are frequently being inferred from multilocus data. However, the behavior of many methods for performing this inference has remained largely unexplored. Some methods have been proven to be consistent given certain evolutionary models, whereas others rely on criteria that, although appropriate for many parameter values, have peculiar zones of the parameter space in which they fail to converge on the correct estimate as data sets increase in size.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEstimates from molecular data for the fraction of new nonsynonymous mutations that are adaptive vary strongly across plant species. Much of this variation is due to differences in life history strategies as they influence the effective population size (Ne ). Ample variation for these estimates, however, remains even when comparisons are made across species with similar values of Ne .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPremise Of The Study: The dramatic advances offered by modern DNA sequencers continue to redefine the limits of what can be accomplished in comparative plant biology. Even with recent achievements, however, plant genomes present obstacles that can make it difficult to execute large-scale population and phylogenetic studies on next-generation sequencing platforms. Factors like large genome size, extensive variation in the proportion of organellar DNA in total DNA, polyploidy, and gene number/redundancy contribute to these challenges, and they demand flexible targeted enrichment strategies to achieve the desired goals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPinus lambertiana (sugar pine) is an economically and ecologically important conifer with a 1600-km latitudinal range extending from Oregon, USA, to northern Baja California, Mexico. Like all North American white pines (subsect. Strobus), sugar pine is highly susceptible to white pine blister rust, a disease caused by the fungus Cronartium ribicola.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhylogenetic relationships among Pinus species from subgenus Strobus remain unresolved despite combined efforts based on nrITS and cpDNA. To provide greater resolution among these taxa, a 900-bp intron from a late embryogenesis abundant (LEA)-like gene (IFG8612)was sequenced from 39 pine species, with two or more alleles representing 33 species. Nineteen of 33 species exhibited allelic nonmonphyly in the strict consensus tree, and 10 deviated significantly from allelic monophyly based on topology incongruence tests.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSilent mutation rate estimates for Pinus vary 50-fold, ranging from angiosperm-like to among the slowest reported for plants. These differences either reflect extraordinary genomic processes or inconsistent fossil calibration, and they have important consequences for population and biogeographical inferences. Here we estimate mutation rates from 4 Pinus species that represent the major lineages using 11 nuclear and 4 chloroplast loci.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSequence data from nrITS and cpDNA have failed to fully resolve phylogenetic relationships among Pinus species. Four low-copy nuclear genes, developed from the screening of 73 mapped conifer anchor loci, were sequenced from 12 species representing all subsections. Individual loci do not uniformly support either the nrITS or cpDNA hypotheses and in some cases produce unique topologies.
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