Adil GÜNER, Vehbi ESER - optima

ISOLATION AND SPECIATION IN THE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN:
HYPOCHAERIS LAEVIGATA L. (ASTERACEAE, LACTUCEAE) COMPLEX
AS A STUDY MODEL
María Ángeles ORTIZ 1 , Salvador TALAVERA 1 , Karen TREMETSBERGER 2 ,
& Tod F. STUESSY 3
1,2 Universidad de Sevilla, Dpto. Biología Vegetal y Ecología, Apto. 1095, 41080, Sevilla, España
1 aortiz@us.es; 2 stalavera@us.es
2 Institut für Botanik. University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences. Gregor-Mendel-Straße 33.
1180 Vienna, Austria, karin.tremetsberger@boku.ac.at
3 Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, University of Vienna, Rennweg 14, A-
1030 Vienna, Austria; tod.stuessy@univie.ac.at
The Mediterranean Basin is considered as a hotspot of plant biodiversity, with more than
25.000 species. This heterogeneity is the result of geologic and bioclimatic changes which
occur during millions of years, shaping the species distributions and promoting local
expansions or extinctions, depending on the capacity of each taxa to adapt to the changing
habitat. Precisely, the most drastic factors that affected the distributional area of the species,
in the last two million years, are the establishment of the Mediterranean climate (2.3 my) and
the processes of contact and isolation between the different land masses, due to the sea-level
fluctuations during the glacial and interglacial periods, at the Pleistocene.
We focus this study in three species belonging to Hypochaeris sect. Seriola (H. laevigata, H.
rutea, and H. saldensis). Hypochaeris laevigata is restricted to North West Africa (Morocco,
Algeria and Tunisia), South Italy and Sicily; H. rutea is endemic to South Spain, and H.
saldensis lives only in Algeria. These three species are closely related, and we assess the
relationship between species, and their population structure nowadays, with the purpose to
infer how their ancestral area was. For this purpose we applied AFLP (“Amplified fragment
length polymorphism”), which are dominant molecular markers, highly polymorphic, to 273
individuals and 35 populations in all the distributional area of the species. The role of the
main geographical barriers which affect the phylogeographic patterns founded is discussed.
Keywords: Hypochaeris, population structure, AFLP, Strait of Gibraltar, and Mediterranean
Basin.
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