Publications by authors named "Samira Ben-Menni Schuler"

The tree fern , a threatened Iberian-Macaronesian endemism, represents the sole European species of the order Cyatheales. Considered a Tertiary relict of European Palaeotropical flora, its evolutionary history and genetic diversity, potentially influenced by presumed high clonal propagation, remain largely unknown. This study elucidates the phylogeographic history of , assessing the impact of vegetative reproduction on population dynamics and genetic variability.

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Fern phylogeographic studies have mostly focused on the influence of the Pleistocene climate on fern distributions and the prevalence of long-distance dispersal. The effect of pre-Pleistocene events on the distributions of fern species is largely unexplored. Here, we elucidate a hypothetical scenario for the evolutionary history of , hypothesised to be of Tertiary palaeotropical flora with a peculiar perennial gametophyte.

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Macaronesia has been considered a refuge region of the formerly widespread subtropical lauroid flora that lived in Southern Europe during the Tertiary. The study of relict angiosperms has shown that Macaronesian relict taxa preserve genetic variation and revealed general patterns of colonization and dispersal. However, information on the conservation of genetic diversity and range dynamics rapidly diminishes when referring to pteridophytes, despite their dominance of the herbaceous stratum in the European tropical palaeoflora.

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Pollen grains show an enormous variety of aperture systems. What genes are involved in the aperture formation pathway and how conserved this pathway is in angiosperms remains largely unknown. () encodes a protein of unknown function, essential for aperture formation in Arabidopsis, rice and maize.

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Late Neogene and Quaternary climatic oscillations have greatly shaped the genetic structure of the Mediterranean Basin flora, with mountain plant species tracking warm interglacials/cold glacials by means of altitudinal shifts instead of broad latitudinal ones. Such dynamics may have enhanced population divergence but also secondary contacts. In this paper, we use a case example of subsection of (comprising three narrowly distributed endemic species, , , and ) to test for reticulate evolution and recurrent hybridizations between nearby populations.

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Pollen wall exine is usually deposited non-uniformly on the pollen surface, with areas of low exine deposition corresponding to pollen apertures. Little is known about how apertures form, with the novel Arabidopsis INP1 (INAPERTURATE POLLEN1) protein currently being the only identified aperture factor. In developing pollen, INP1 localizes to three plasma membrane domains and underlies formation of three apertures.

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Studies of pollen wall development produce a great deal of morphological data that supplies useful information regarding taxonomy and systematics. We present the exine development of Euptelea and Pteridophyllum, two taxa whose pollen wall development has never previously been studied using transmission electron microscopy. Both genera are representatives of the two earliest-diverging families of the order Ranunculales and their pollen data are important for the diagnosis of the ancestral pollen features in eudicots.

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Premise Of The Study: We characterize 10 microsatellite loci in the endangered fern Vandenboschia speciosa (Hymenophyllaceae), enabling studies on the genetic population structure of this Macaronesian-European species using DNA hypervariable markers.

Methods And Results: Ten primer sets were developed and tested on 47 individuals in a total of two Iberian populations of V. speciosa.

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