Mutualisms between plants and fruit-eating animals were key to the radiation of angiosperms. Still, phylogenetic uncertainties limit our understanding of fleshy-fruit evolution, as in the case of Solanum, a genus with remarkable fleshy-fruit diversity, but with unresolved phylogenetic relationships. We used 1786 nuclear genes from 247 species, including 122 newly generated transcriptomes/genomes, to reconstruct the Solanum phylogeny and examine the tempo and mode of the evolution of fruit color and size.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe describe a new species of the Geminata clade of from Colombia and provide new distributional records for two additional species, recorded here for the first time in Colombia. J.D.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMol Phylogenet Evol
September 2021
Patterns of diversification in Neotropical plants have been studied intensively over the past decades. Most studies have focused on groups that migrated to and radiated into the Neotropics, however, with little focus on understanding diversification patterns in indigenous Neotropical groups. This study focuses on Solanum section Brevantherum Seithe (Solanaceae), a group of Neotropical nightshade shrubs or treelets defined mostly by terminal inflorescences with long peduncles, plurifoliate sympodial units and porrect-stellate, dendritic-echinoid, or lepidote trichomes.
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