AUTHOR=Liu Bin-Bin , Liu Guang-Ning , Hong De-Yuan , Wen Jun 

TITLE=Eriobotrya Belongs to Rhaphiolepis (Maleae, Rosaceae): Evidence From Chloroplast Genome and Nuclear Ribosomal DNA Data

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Plant Science

VOLUME=10

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2019.01731

DOI=10.3389/fpls.2019.01731

ISSN=1664-462X

ABSTRACT=<p>The <italic>Eriobotrya-Rhaphiolepis</italic> (ER) clade consists of about 46 species distributed in East and Southeast Asia. Although <italic>Eriobotrya</italic> and <italic>Rhaphiolepis</italic> have been supported to form a clade, the monophyly of <italic>Eriobotrya</italic> and <italic>Rhaphiolepis</italic> at the genus level has never been well tested and their phylogenetic positions in Maleae still remain uncertain. This study aims to reconstruct a robust phylogeny of the ER clade in the framework of Maleae with a broad taxon sampling and clarify the phylogenetic relationship between <italic>Eriobotrya</italic> and <italic>Rhaphiolepis</italic>. This study employed sequences of the whole plastome (WP) and entire nuclear ribosomal DNA (nrDNA) repeats assembled from the genome skimming approach and included 83 samples representing 76 species in 32 genera of Rosaceae, especially Maleae. The Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Bayesian Analysis (BI) based on three datasets, i.e., WP, coding sequences of plastome (CDS), and nrDNA, strongly supported the paraphyly of <italic>Eriobotrya</italic>, within which <italic>Rhaphiolepis</italic> was nested. Our plastid tree supported the sister relationship between the ER clade and <italic>Heteromeles</italic>, and the nrDNA tree, however, did not resolve the phylogenetic placement of the ER clade in Maleae. Strong incongruence between the plastid and the nuclear trees is most likely explained by hybridization events, which may have played an important role in the evolutionary history of the ER clade. Molecular, morphological, and geographic evidence all supports the merge of <italic>Eriobotrya</italic> with <italic>Rhaphiolepis</italic>, which has the nomenclatural priority. We herein transferred 36 taxa of <italic>Eriobotrya</italic> to <italic>Rhaphiolepis</italic>. We also proposed a new name, <italic>Rhaphiolepis loquata</italic> B.B.Liu &amp; J.Wen, for the economically important loquat, as the specific epithet “japonica” was pre-occupied in <italic>Rhaphiolepis</italic>.</p>