Building a Subtropical Forest Community Phylogeny Based on Plant DNA Barcodes from Dinghushan Plot

Abstract

Reconstructing phylogenies at the community scale remains a fundamental but important work for current researches related to plant systematics, which can be facilitated due to the arising of plant DNA barcodes. We sampled, sequenced, and employed matK rbcL, and psbA-trnH to generate a multi-locus barcode for 20-ha Dinghushan subtropical forest dynamics plot, with 183 angiosperm species belonging to 110 genera (51 families from 24 orders) in South China. Compared to the two-locus barcode (rbcL+matK, and rbcL+psbA-trnH), the supermatrix of three barcode loci discriminated most of closed related taxa and generated a better-resolved community phylogeny utilizing an unconstraint approach in the Dinghushan plot, providing a first case that a subtropical forest plot with similarly limited taxon sampling with fewer orders and families could also provide significant congruence to the overall angiosperm phylogeny.