ИСТИНА

Taxonomic concepts of the hygrohalophytic genus Salicornia are controversial due to high phenotypic plasticity, occurrence of polyploidy and apparent incomplete speciation in this relatively recently evolved but widespread lineage. Studies based on nuclear ribosomal ETS sequences revealed only limited phylogenetic information, which is often incongruent with morphology. We use plastid genome sequences of East European Salicornia to infer whether the reported incongruence between molecular and morphological data can be biased by relative low variation of nrETS region. To resolve these relationships, we employed next-generation sequencing on Illumina platform for 11 accessions representing all major morphotypes of Salicornia occurring in East Europe. Complete plastid genomes are 153,290–153,483 bp in length and possess a typical architecture with the large single-copy and small single-copy regions and two inverted repeats. Gene size, content, order, AT content, and IR/SC boundary structure are similar among all Salicornia genomes. Aligned data contained 128544 positions and were analyzed using Maximum Parsimony, Maximum likelihood and Bayesian Inference. We report phylogenetic analyses of these plastomes as well as ETS polymorphism analyses. Plastid genomes provide much more phylogenetic information than nrETS sequences. Though not well-supported, phylogenetic trees of Salicornia based on nrETS data provide a good estimate of evolutionary patterns in the genus. Next generation sequencing of plastomes represents an efficient method of robust phylogenetic inference in Salicornia. Reticulate evolution seemingly did not play an important role in diversification of Salicornia.