Date of Award
Spring 5-2017
Degree Type
Honors College Thesis
Department
Biological Sciences
First Advisor
Mac H. Alford
Advisor Department
Biological Sciences
Abstract
Salicaceae are an economically and ecologically important family of flowering plants. The family includes willows and cottonwoods and was recently enlarged to include a large number of tropical species formerly placed in the family Flacourtiaceae. Relationships of these tropical relatives to willows and cottonwoods have been explored at a basic level using morphology and plastid DNA data, but to date no molecular phylogenies have been constructed with significant sampling of nuclear DNA, which sometimes results in a different picture of relationships because of its biparental inheritance. For this project, I sampled one region of nuclear DNA (GBSSI) across the family to infer relationships among the genera of Salicaceae. These results were mostly congruent with previous analyses, although sequences from some key species closely related to Salix and Populus were not obtained, possibly due to multiple copies of the gene.
Copyright
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Recommended Citation
Diffey, John Marshall, "Phylogenetic Relationships of Salicaceae Based on Analyses of Nuclear DNA Data" (2017). Honors Theses. 521.
https://aquila.usm.edu/honors_theses/521