Molecular Approaches to the Systematics and Phylogeography of Critic Plant and Algal Groups

Dear Colleagues,

Classical systematic approaches, especially morphology, have served taxonomy over centuries through the description and identification of most of the extant taxa and the assessment of their evolutionary relationships. However, in groups characterized by overall simple morphology (e.g., algae), phenotypic plasticity, and extensive hybridization, morphological data are often difficult to employ in identifying taxa and often fail to properly provide robust classification schemes and phylogenies as a consequence of the limited number of homologues characters to study.

The introduction of molecular techniques and new analytical approaches in the last few decades has opened up new possibilities in the fields of systematics and phylogeography, resulting in thorough reassessments in most of the investigated groups, enlightening unsuspected phylogenetic relationships at any taxonomic rank and enabling the detection of new evolutionary lineages. Information from DNA sequences has been used to identify taxa with ambiguous morphology and to circumscribe them by means of objective criteria such as monophyly and genetic distance. In the case of algae, molecular tools have revealed the occurrence of many cryptic species; in the case of some land plant groups, intraspecific variation detected via morphological assessment did not always result in significant genetic differences to justify specific or infra-specific ranks. However, in some cases, even the genetic information gathered via the sequencing of few loci was revealed to be insufficient to distinguish taxa characterized by extensive hybridization or low mutation rates. The advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has further prompted evolutionary studies in these difficult groups by enabling the transition from the analysis of kilobases of data to mega/gigabases of data from the three genomic compartments (chloroplast, mitochondrion, and nucleus). In parallel, new methodologies have been developed to assess homology and detect hybridization and incomplete lineage in order to provide more accurate and robust phylogenies.

This Special Issue aims to collect studies (mostly research article but also reviews) that use genetic and genomic approaches to resolve systematic and phylogeographic aspects of plant and algal taxa for which the sole morphological assessment was insufficient. Both methodological and case study papers are welcome.

Dr. Daniele De Luca
Dr. Emanuele Del Guacchio
Guest Editors

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• algae
• plants
• phylogenetics
• phylogeography
• species delimitation