Revision of Passiflora Subgenus Decaloba ... - Passion Flowers

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product for all accessions of the supersection as revealed by gel electrophoresis,
I noticed that the directly sequenced PCR product for several accessions of P.
suberosa ssp. suberosa, P. suberosa ssp. litoralis and what morphologically
appeared to be P. pallida contained polymorphic sites (where two discernible
peaks of approximately equal strength appeared in the chromatograms). Thus, I
began to clone several of my PCR products and found that the accessions with
polymorphic sites often proved to possess differing, apparently functional copies
of ITS; there were no significant nucleotide substitutions, insertion-deletion
events, or substitutions (particularly in conserved regions) apparent in the
sequences that would indicate that the copies were nonfunctional. Four
individuals of supersection Cieca contained polymorphic sites (two accessions of
P. suberosa ssp. litoralis from Puebla and Veracruz, México, one accession of P.
suberosa ssp. suberosa from Haiti, and one accession from Florida, USA that
had small flowers similar to P. pallida), while the rest of the species did not
contain any polymorphisms in the ITS region. The cloned sequences of
Passiflora suberosa ssp. suberosa from Haiti were placed in two different clades,
with two clones falling within a moderately supported clade containing other
members of the subspecies from the Caribbean and the other two forming a
group in the strict consensus tree, which is positioned sister to P. suberosa ssp.
litoralis. In addition, cloned entities of Passiflora suberosa ssp. litoralis from the
states of Puebla and Veracruz, México are found in separate clades. The clones
of the accession that morphologically fits the description of P. pallida [“sub. w/
pall. aff. USA (FL)", see Fig. 4.5] from the United States occur in both the well-