Andrea Costa

Premise of the study: The development of three low-copy nuclear markers for low taxonomic level phylogenies in Asteraceae with emphasis on the subtribe Hieraciinae is reported. Methods and results: Marker candidates were selected by comparing a Lactuca complementary DNA (cDNA) library with public DNA sequence databases. Interspecific variation a...

Low-copy nuclear genes have been suggested as a promising source of independent phylogeographic markers in plants. However, the available studies at the intraspecific level have revealed that extracting information from them is frequently hampered by paralogy and lack of coalescence of alleles. It is thus relevant to test their utility with plants...

The taxonomy of an Iberian endemic Aristolochia is treated, based on morphological and cytological characters. A brief description of its main diagnostic characters, distribution and habitat is included, as well as a distribution map and a few comments on its possible phylogenetic relationships. A new combination is proposed, raising this taxon fro...

Aim The aim of this study was to test hypotheses regarding some of the main phylogeographical patterns proposed for European plants, in particular the locations of glacial refugia, the post‐glacial colonization routes, and genetic affinities between southern (alpine) and northern (boreal) populations. Location The mountains of Europe (Alps, Balkans...

Compared to organelle genomes, the nuclear genome comprises a vast reservoir of genes that potentially harbor phylogenetic signal. Despite the valuable data that sequencing projects of model systems offer, relatively few single-copy nuclear genes are being used in systematics. In part this is due to the challenges inherent in generating orthologous...