The Importance in Phylogenetic Relationships of The Regions Belonging to Nuclear and Plastid DNA among Crocus biflorus subspecies

The genus Crocus L. (Iridaceae) composed of about 200 species is taxonomically very problematic, because of introgression and backcrossing observed among closely related species. Furthermore, determination of new taxa and variable characters observed in these new taxa are other important reasons of the taxonomic problems. Recently, many molecular based studies to understand the phylogenetic relationships of the Crocus taxa show the presence of the problems among the taxa, especially in C. biflorus subspecies. As a result of this, some researchers state that the term of subspecies must be changed in the genus and the most of subspecies must be categorized as species. For these reasons, in this study, the four regions belonging to nuclear and plastid DNA (ITS1-5.8S rRNA-ITS2, psbA-trnH IGS, rpoC1 and trnL-trnF IGS) were used to understand the identification and separation abilities of taxa studied, in addition to understanding the taxonomy of C. biflorus subspecies.

Keywords:

Crocus, taxonomic problems, C. biflorus nuclear and plastid DNA,

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