Sven Pollner's research while affiliated with Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research and other places

... Therefore, recent anatomical and cytological data and phylogenetic reports approve the delimitation of A. subg. Amerallium as a separate subgenus from the other Allium subgenera (Mes et al. 1999;Friesen et al. 2006;Li et al. 2010;Genç et al. 2013;Mashayekhi and Colummbus 2014). According to our results, we suggest that anatomical features of bulb tunics could be significant tools in identification of A. subg. ...

... Screening for drought tolerance and diversity among different cultivars based on morphological characterization is not enough, as these traits are more sensitive to environmental changes (Fufa et al., 2005). Therefore, the DNA molecular markers have been used as an accurate tool that are not influenced by environmental effects (Bachmann et al., 2001;Tatikonda et al., 2009). In addition, they can easily detect polymorphism that may result from nucleotide change or mutation in the genome loci (Hartl and Clark, 1997). ...

... For the past two decades, DNA markers (plastid DNA and nuclear ribosomal DNA) have been utilized to reveal evolutionary processes and taxonomic relationships within the entire genus Allium (Dubouzet and Shinoda, 1999;Fritsch and Friesen, 2002;Friesen et al., 2006;Li et al., 2010) or groups within it, such as subgenus Amerallium (Samoylov et al., 1995(Samoylov et al., , 1999, subgenus Melanocrommyum (Dubouzet and Shinoda, 1998;Gurushidze et al., 2008;Fritsch et al., 2010) and section Cepa (Miller) Prokhanov (Yusupov et al., 2019(Yusupov et al., , 2021Liu et al., 2020). In our study, we used publicly available (deposited in NCBI) sequences of the ITS region to construct a phylogenetic dendrogram of 72 species, 56 sections and 14 subgenera of Allium (the species were chosen from a list of 95 species available from the NCBI) representing three evolutionary lineages (EL1, EL2, EL3) (Friesen et al., 2006;Li et al., 2010;Xie et al., 2020) to determine how closely the molecular-and seed morphology-based Allium phylogenies correspond. ...

... In general, the major morphological traits used to assess Allium taxonomy include rhizome and bulb tunics, stamens, tepals, and filaments. Rhizome and bulb tunics are the most useful at the subgeneric level (Friesen et al., 1999;Friesen et al., 2006;Choi and Oh, 2011); pistil morphology is useful for clades within subgenera (Choi et al., 2012), and the floral characteristics of tepals and filaments are useful at the species level (Xu and Kamelin, 2000;Choi et al., , 2012Jang et al., 2021). ...

... The genus includes species of great economic and agronomic interest, Several attempts have been made to reconstruct the phylogeny of the genus [1]. The phylogenies obtained through parsimony and neighbor-joining methods using internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences of nuclear ribosomal RNAs were generally congruent with each other [1], with the exception of the placement of certain species, and with previous molecular phylogenies [2]. According to these phylogenies, the development of bulbs in Allium species is the ancestral state for this trait, being common in the species of the Amerallium and Allium subgenera. ...

... However, the limitations presented in comparison to other taxa do not detract from our findings, but instead identify future directions of such research. In plants, genetic diversity is dependent on life history traits (Nybom & Bartish, 2000), and Allium species do not exhibit long-range dispersal (Friesen et al., 2000), ultimately restricting gene flow between populations. Environmental factors such as temperature, moisture, light availability, nutrients, and surrounding vegetative composition also have a strong effect on genetic differentiation and diversity within and among plant populations (Nikzat et al., 2021;Reisch et al., 2003;Still et al., 2005;Temunovic et al., 2012). ...