Out of Africa to Madagascar - then back? Molecular phylogenetics and biogeography of tribe Tarchonantheae (Asteraceae: Tarchonanthoideae)

Premise of research. Molecular data have revolutionized inferences of phylogenetic relationships and historical biogeography of flowering plants. Two small genera, Brachylaena and Tarchonanthus, are the only members of Asteraceae tribe Tarchonantheae (subfamily Tarchonanthoideae). The tribe is morphologically distinct within Asteraceae and is resolved as monophyletic with molecular markers. It is distributed in southern Africa and Madagascar. The purposes of the present study were to determine whether molecular data resolve the two genera as monophyletic and to infer the origin and dispersals that produced the current distribution of the tribe.
Methodology. Sequences from the nuclear ribosomal ITS and ETS and plastid rpl16 intron were analyzed using maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses to resolve phylogenetic relationships within the tribe. An ancestral trait reconstruction assessed the likely ancestral range for Tarchonantheae using BioGeoBEARS, and BEAST was used for dating diverg..., Sequence data were generated using Sanger sequencing of cleaned PCR products for three loci. Multiple sequence alignment was performed for each locus independently and loci were analyzed individually and as part of a concatenation using Bayesian Inference and Maximum Likelihood. Fossil-calibrated divergence dating analyses were carried out using BEAST and biogeographic reconstruction was performed using BioGeoBEARS. , Alignment files can be opened using any text editor; tree files can be opened using any phylogenetic tree imaging software (e.g., FigTree), and BEAUTi .xml config files can be opened using a text editor or the BEAUTi v.1.10.4 software. , # Analysis Files associated with [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bnzs7h4gc](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bnzs7h4gc)

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his Dryad submission includes files associated with [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bnzs7h4gc](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.bnzs7h4gc) including .fasta alignment files, .xml configuration files for BEAST analyses, raw .tre output files from phylogenetic analyses and BEAST analyses, as well as figures published as part of this article. For any questions, please contact the corresponding author for this dataset or the published manuscript.

## Description of the data and file structure

Multiple sequence alignments are saved as .fasta format; these alignments were used in the phylogenetic analyses described in the manuscript text. .xml files are config files used for divergence dating analyses described in the text. .eps files are image/figure files in this article and .tre files are raw .tre output files that resulted from comparative phylogenetic analyses.

.eps file...