Understanding the systematic implications of pollinium morphology of Aeridinae (Orchidaceae)

Molecular phylogenetic studies have suggested major clades in the subtribe Aeridinae of Orchidaceae. However, systematic morphological charaters is still lacking. We carried out this study on the pollinium morphologies of subtribe Aeridinae with emphases on the aperture types and the pollinium sculpture to find out their systematic signification in light of a molecular phylogeny. The results indicate that most species have cleft type and few with porate type or none. The shapes of most pollinium are flat spheroid but not constant at genera levels. The longth scope of the pollinium is 204-2606 um and the width scope is 178-1524 um. The long and wide pollinium are easily found in more primitive groups. The short and narrow pollinium are commonly found in more evolutionary groups. Shapes and sizes of individual units of pollinium vary from uniformity to difference with few exceptions: isometrical polygons in Phalaenopsis of Phalaenopsis clade, Vanda clade and Aerides clade and irregular sh..., Molecular phylogeny of pollinium samples—5 DNA sequences including ITS, atpI-H, matK, psbA-trnH and trnL-F were downloaded from Genebank and an alternative species from the same genus was used when DNA sequences of the pollinium samples were unavailable (Appendix 2). Sequence alignments were made with Clustal X (Thompson et al. 1997) and refined manually with BioEdit (Hall 1999). Phylogenetic analyses were performed under maximum parsimony (MP). Some unavailable sequences in combined data analyses were treated as missing.
Parsimony analyses were conducted in PAUP* 4.0b10 (Swofford 2002), and all characters were equally weighted and unordered. The test settings included 1000 replications of random addition sequence and heuristic search with TBR branch swapping. To estimate the clade support, heuristic searches were completed for 1000 bootstrap replicates with 10000 random sequence additions (holding one tree at each step) (Harbaugh and Baldwin 2007).
The datasets were also analyzed under..., , # Molecular phylogenic tree

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cnp5hqcc1](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.cnp5hqcc1)

## Description of the data and file structure

The file can be used to build the molecular phylogenetic tree. The file (5_DNA_GE_NES.nex) includes 5 DNA sequences including ITS, *atpI-H*, *matK*, psbA-trnH, and trnL-F downloaded from Genebank.