Exploring evolution and diversity of Chinese Dipterocarpaceae using next-generation sequencing

Tropical forests, a key-category of land ecosystems, are faced with the world’s highest levels of habitat conversion and associated biodiversity loss. In tropical Asia, Dipterocarpaceae are one of the economically and ecologically most important tree families, but their genomic diversity and evolution remain understudied, hampered by a lack of available genetic resources. Southern China represents the northern limit for Dipterocarpaceae, and thus changes in habitat ecology, community composition and adaptability to climatic conditions are of particular interest in this group. Phylogenomics is a tool for exploring both biodiversity and evolutionary relationships through space and time using plastome, nuclear and mitochondrial genome. We generated full plastome and Nuclear Ribosomal Cistron (NRC) data for Chinese Dipterocarpaceae species as a first step to improve our understanding of their ecology and evolutionary relationships. We generated the plastome of Dipterocarpus turbinatus, the ...