Publication Date:
2007-01-16
Description:
Species of Rafflesiaceae possess the world's largest flowers (up to 1 meter in diameter), yet their precise evolutionary relationships have been elusive, hindering our understanding of the evolution of their extraordinary reproductive morphology. We present results of phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial, nuclear, and plastid data showing that Rafflesiaceae are derived from within Euphorbiaceae, the spurge family. Most euphorbs produce minute flowers, suggesting that the enormous flowers of Rafflesiaceae evolved from ancestors with tiny flowers. Given the inferred phylogeny, we estimate that there was a circa 79-fold increase in flower diameter on the stem lineage of Rafflesiaceae, making this one of the most dramatic cases of size evolution reported for eukaryotes.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Davis, Charles C -- Latvis, Maribeth -- Nickrent, Daniel L -- Wurdack, Kenneth J -- Baum, David A -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2007 Mar 30;315(5820):1812. Epub 2007 Jan 11.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University Herbaria, 22 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. cdavis@oeb.harvard.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17218493" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Angiosperms/*anatomy & histology/*classification/genetics
;
Bayes Theorem
;
Biological Evolution
;
Euphorbiaceae/anatomy & histology/*classification
;
Flowers/*anatomy & histology
;
Genes, Plant
;
Likelihood Functions
;
Phylogeny
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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