Phylogenetic analysis of Marchantiidae (Marchantiophyta): towards a robustly diagnosed classification.

FLORES J. R.; SUÁREZ G. M.; CATALANO S. A.

Buenos Aires

Congreso; The Annual Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society; 2016

Willi Hennig Society

During the last decade, phylogenetic analyses of molecular data have deeply impacted over theclassification schemes of bryophytes. The increasingly use of molecular data also implied a seldom use ofmorphological data. As a consequence, many of the proposed classifications are based on unreliablemorphological diagnosis. In this contribution, a phylogenetic analysis of Marchantiidae (complex thalloidliverworts) is carried out by including both morphological and molecular datasets. Taxonomic samplinginvolved 41 ingroup species. This is, all the genera, families and orders of Marchantiidae. Outgroupsampling included 27 species and 10 orders of leafy and simple thalloid liverworts altogether.Morphological dataset comprised 118 discrete and 5 continuous characters. Molecular data consisted of11 molecular markers (3 mitochondrial regions, 7 plastid regions and 26S nuclear gene). Phylogeneticanalyses were conducted under parsimony as optimality criterion. Performance of different impliedweighting settings (standard implied weighting, differential character weighting, differential blockweighting) was tested on the ground of trees? stability. In addition, former hypotheses about therelationship between molecular evolution rate and node support/stability are evaluated on the base ofrandomization tests. Final results are in agreement with most molecular phylogenies. Several newsynapomorphies are found in many groups. Previous diagnosing traits are discarded as such or aremodified.