Phylogenies are a central and indispensable tool for evolutionary and ecological research. Even though most angiosperm families are well investigated from a phylogenetic point of view, there are far less possibilities to carry out large-scale meta-analyses at order level or higher. Here, we reconstructed a large-scale dated phylogeny including nearly 1/8th of all angiosperm species, based on two plastid barcoding genes, matK (incl. trnK) and rbcL. Novel sequences were generated for several species, while the rest of the data were mined from GenBank. The resulting tree was dated using 56 angiosperm fossils as calibration points. The resulting megaphylogeny is one of the largest dated phylogenetic tree of angiosperms yet, consisting of 36,101 sampled species, representing 8,399 genera, 426 families and all orders. This novel framework will be useful for investigating different broad scale research questions in ecological and evolutionary biology.
Keywords: angiosperms; ecology; evolution; large-scale dating analyses; phylogeny.
Steven B. Janssens, Thomas L.P. Couvreur, Arne Mertens, Gilles Dauby, Leo-Paul M. J. Dagallier, Samuel Vanden Abeele, Filip Vandelook, Maurizio Mascarello, Hans Beeckman, Marc Sosef, Vincent Droissart, Michelle van der Bank, Olivier Maurin, William Hawthorne, Cicely Marshall, Maxime Réjou-Méchain, Denis Beina, Fidele Baya, Vincent Merckx, Brecht Verstraete, Olivier Hardy.