Journal article

Analysis of chloroplast genomes and a supermatrix inform reclassification of the Rhodomelaceae (Rhodophyta)

Pilar Diaz-Tapia, Christine A Maggs, John A West, Heroen Verbruggen

JOURNAL OF PHYCOLOGY | WILEY | Published : 2017

Abstract

With over a thousand species, the Rhodomelaceae is the most species-rich family of red algae. While its genera have been assigned to 14 tribes, the high-level classification of the family has never been evaluated with a molecular phylogeny. Here, we reassess its classification by integrating genome-scale phylogenetic analysis with observations of the morphological characters of clades. In order to resolve relationships among the main lineages of the family we constructed a phylogeny with 55 chloroplast genomes (52 newly determined). The majority of branches were resolved with full bootstrap support. We then added 266 rbcL, 125 18S rRNA gene and 143 cox1 sequences to construct a comprehensive..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Australian Research Council


Awarded by Australian Biological Resources Study


Awarded by Melbourne Bioinformatics


Funding Acknowledgements

PDT acknowledges support by the postdoctoral programmes Axudas de apoio a etapa inicial de formacion posdoutoral do Plan I2C (Xunta de Galicia). This work was supported by grants from the Australian Research Council (FT110100585), the Australian Biological Resources Study (RFL213-08) and also benefited from funding provided by the University of Melbourne (UoM-FAPESP SPRINT grant), the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment and the Bush Blitz program (Australian Biological Resources Study). This research was supported by use of the computational facilities of Melbourne Bioinformatics (project UOM0007) and the Nectar Research Cloud, a collaborative Australian research platform supported by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). We warmly thank the members of the Verbruggen lab (J. Costa, V. Marcelino, M. Brookes, C. Cremen and C. Jackson) for providing samples and assistance during field and lab work. We are grateful to J. Huisman, M. Terradas, F. Rindi, M. Toyota Fujii, V. Cassano, N. Robinson, R. Carballeira for supplying materials and Y. Metti for sharing some sequences. We thank M.D. Guiry for advice on nomenclatural issues.