title: Comparative phylogeography of two sympatric beeches in subtropical China: Species-specific geographic mosaic of lineages.
abstract: In subtropical China, large-scale phylogeographic comparisons among multiple sympatric plants with similar ecological preferences are scarce, making generalizations about common response to historical events necessarily tentative. A phylogeographic comparison of two sympatric Chinese beeches (Fagus lucida and F. longipetiolata, 21 and 28 populations, respectively) was conducted to test whether they have responded to historical events in a concerted fashion and to determine whether their phylogeographic structure is exclusively due to Quaternary events or it is also associated with pre-Quaternary events. Twenty-three haplotypes were recovered for F. lucida and F. longipetiolata (14 each one and five shared). Both species exhibited a species-specific mosaic distribution of haplotypes, with many of them being range-restricted and even private to populations. The two beeches had comparable total haplotype diversity but F. lucida had much higher within-population diversity than F. longipetiolata. Molecular dating showed that the time to most recent common ancestor of all haplotypes was 6.36 Ma, with most haplotypes differentiating during the Quaternary. [Correction added on 14 October 2013, after first online publication: the timeunit has been corrected to '6.36'.] Our results support a late Miocene origin and southwards colonization of Chinese beeches when the aridity in Central Asia intensified and the monsoon climate began to dominate the East Asia. During the Quaternary, long-term isolation in subtropical mountains of China coupled with limited gene flow would have lead to the current species-specific mosaic distribution of lineages.
authors: Laboratory of Subtropical Biodiversity, Jiangxi Agricultural University Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330045, China.
authors: Zhi-Yong
authors: ZY
authors: Zhang
authors: Rong
authors: R
authors: Wu
authors: Qun
authors: Q
authors: Wang
authors: Zhi-Rong
authors: ZR
authors: Zhang
authors: Jordi
authors: J
authors: López-Pujol
authors: Deng-Mei
authors: DM
authors: Fan
authors: De-Zhu
authors: DZ
authors: Li
keywords: Fagus longipetiolata; Fagus lucida; atpI-atpH; chloroplast DNA; comparative phylogeography; ndhJ-trnF; subtropical China