Phylogenetic análisis of genus Sacciolepis (Paniceae: Panicoideae: Poaceae).

DE GENNARO, D., POZNER, R. & MORRONE, O.

Tucumán-Argentina

Otro; XXVII Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society y VIII Reunión Argentina de Cladística y Biogeografía.; 2008

Willi Hennig Society

The genus Sacciolepis Nash (Poaceae: Panicoideae: Paniceae) comprises nearly 23 species widely distributed in southeastern and western Africa with a few species in America, Asia and Australia. This genus is characterized by spike-like inflorescences, lower glume gibbous and upper glume and lower lemma with conspicuous nerves. Sacciolepis was revised only in regional floras of Africa (e.g. Gibbs Russell et al., 1990), Asia (e.g. Bor, 1960) and Australia (e.g. Webster, 1987) or only studied for America (e.g. Judziewicz, 1990a,b; Wipff, 2003). These treatments reveal unresolved taxonomic problems and the existence of species with difficult circumscription. In addition, there is not a comprehensive study of the genus that provides information about interspecific phylogenetic relationships. The aims of this work are: to test the monophyly of Sacciolepis, to study the phylogenetic relationships among the species. Anatomical-morphological characters were included in the data matrix, with 30 continuous and 58 discrete characters. The heuristic searches were carried out using TNT soft (Goloboff et al., 2003) under equal weights and implied weighting. Discrete and continuous characters were analyzed altogether and separated. The analysis revealed the monophyletic origin of the genus and the valuable contribution of continuous characters to elucidate interspecific relationships.