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Morphological and DNA analyses suggest the reinstatement of four synonymized Cecropia species

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Abstract

The genus Cecropia contains 61 species of high ecological importance in the Neotropics. Cecropia pachystachya Trécul has a wide geographic distribution and high morphological variability. The last taxonomic review of C. pachystachya was performed in 2005 and incorporated seven other Cecropia species by synonymization. However, this synonymization was not fully accepted by experts in Urticaceae because of high morphological variations in the taxon. In this study, we aimed to evaluate whether the morphological variations observed in C. pachystachya morphotypes also occurred at the DNA level and to contribute to the understanding of the evolutionary relationship between species morphotypes. Morphological analysis of eight species descriptors in 28 accessions of C. pachystachya allowed the differentiation of all five morphotypes evaluated. The analysis of the trnL-trnF (plastid) and ITS (nuclear) regions from 24 accessions by maximum parsimony, maximum likelihood, and Bayesian inference methods showed a robust molecular differentiation between C. pachystachya morphotypes. Climate was the main factor that seemed to influence clade formation in the phylogenetic trees. The higher genetic relation among morphotypes from the Amazon, Caatinga, and Cerrado regions corroborated previous hypotheses of close relationships between these biomes in past ages. The morphotype group from the Atlantic Forest seemed to be related to the proposed Pleistocene refuges to this biome. The overall analysis of morphological and molecular data shows robust differences between C. pachystachya synonymized morphotypes, which indicates the need of a taxonomic revision of the C. pachystachya complex and subsequent reinstatement of at least four synonymized species.

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Data archiving statement

The accession used in this work were deposited in the Herbarium of the Instituto de Botância de São Paulo. The number of each access is reported in Table 1. The sequences were deposited in GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/) under numbers shown in Table 1.

Funding

This study was supported by Fundacão Araucária de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico do Estado do Paraná, grant number 229/2010 and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, CAPES, grant number 001.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Plant Genetics and Molecular Biology Laboratory, Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste, UNICENTRO, Guarapuava, Paraná, Brazil

    Jhonnatan De Oliveira Santos, Felipe Liss Zchonski, Laura Pilati & Paulo Roberto Da-Silva

  2. Instituto de Botânica de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    André Luiz Gaglioti & Sergio Romaniuc-Neto

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  1. Jhonnatan De Oliveira Santos
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  2. Felipe Liss Zchonski
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  3. Laura Pilati
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  4. André Luiz Gaglioti
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  6. Paulo Roberto Da-Silva
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Contributions

Conceptualization: Paulo Roberto Da-Silva, André Luiz Gaglioti, Sergio Romaniuc-Neto; methodology: Jhonnatan De Oliveira Santos, Felipe Liss Zchonski, Laura Pilati; formal analysis and investigation: Jhonnatan De Oliveira Santos, Laura Pilati, Felipe Liss Zchon, André Luiz Gaglioti, Paulo Roberto Da Silva; writing—original draft preparation: Jhonnatan De Oliveira Santos; writing—review and editing: Paulo Roberto Da-Silva, André Luiz Gaglioti, Sergio Romaniuc-Neto; funding acquisition: Paulo Roberto Da-Silva; supervision: Paulo Roberto Da-Silva, André Luiz Gaglioti. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Paulo Roberto Da-Silva.

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Santos, J.D.O., Zchonski, F.L., Pilati, L. et al. Morphological and DNA analyses suggest the reinstatement of four synonymized Cecropia species. Tree Genetics & Genomes 16, 51 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11295-020-01445-z

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