Oct. 24-26, 2009, Yingjie Overseas Exchange Center, Peking University, Beijing, China中文版

Phylogeography of plants in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Xiao-Quan Wang

State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China

Abstract

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) represents one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, and harbors the richest alpine flora on the earth with the prosperity of endemic species. The uplift history of QTP and effects of the uplift on local climate and biological evolution have drawn tremendous interest from the scientific community. Of great interest is to investigate the mechanisms for the development of the high plant species diversity and the change of plant distribution in response to the Quaternary climatic oscillations on the plateau. Our recent studies of plant phylogeography revealed genetic poverty of the populations distributed in the central “platform” of QTP and the Himalaya and genetic richness in the Hengduan Mountains populations, clearly indicating that the extant populations in the central and western QTP have originated by colonization/recolonization from its glacial refugia in the southeastern QTP, accompanied with strong founder effects. In particular, population differentiation of these plants is also very high, even in all of the three genomes (paternal chloroplast, maternal mitochondrial, biparental nuclear) of the wind-pollinated conifer, and more than half of the DNA haplotypes/alleles are population-specific. In addition, a significant association between genetic and geographical distances was detected both in the species range and in the Hengduan Mountains region. This unique population genetic structure could be attributed to restricted gene flow caused by the complicated topography that formed during the uplift of the QTP, and thus sheds lights on the importance of geographical isolation in the species diversification in this biodiversity hotspot.

Xiao-Quan Wang

State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China

Biography

Prof. Dr. Xiao-Quan Wang is the director of the Research Center for Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the director of Plant Taxonomy and Evolution Committee of the Botanical Society of China. His research encompasses three main areas: (1) molecular systematics and biogeography of seed plants, especially conifers; (2) speciation and phylogeography of plants in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau; and (3) molecular evolution, with an emphasis on the evolution of gene families involved in the lignin biosynthesis pathway. He served as the executive chief editor (1999-2003) and the chief editor (2004-2008) ofthe journal Biodiversity Science, and currently serves as an editorial board member of the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, and a handling editor of the Journal of Integrative Plant Biology. For details, see http://www.lseb.cn/en/groups/wangxq.asp.