TRIBE ANDROPOGONEAE FROM NEELUM VALLEY, AZAD JAMMU AND KASHMIR: PHYLOGENY BASED ON MORPHO-ANATOMY

The monophyletic tribe Andropogoneae (Poaceae) is a diverse group, which comprises economically important and environmentally essential clade of C4 grasses. To find out the phylogenetic relationships, both morphological and molecular data sets were used. The morphological matrix including26 characters, were used to build a UPGMA trees implement in PAUP* 4.0b. For molecular studies, combined quality nuclear (ITS) and plastid loci (ndhF, rbcL, trnL-trnF, atpB-rbcL and matK) were used for phylogenetic analysis using Maximum Likelihood (ML) as implemented in RAxML-VI-HPC and Bayesian inference (BI) analyses in MrBayes v. 3.2. Based on 19 key morphological characteristics, anatomical data was subjected to multivariate cluster analysis. We found overall topologies between the morphological tree and ML/BI tree were incongruent. However, Andropogoneae was found to be monophyletic. Astrong support crown clade, including Bothriochloa, Capillipedium, Heteropogon, and Schizachyrium, was recovered within Andropogoneae, and Apludamutica (1.00/100) was the first branch within this tribe. Significant variations for anatomical characteristics were exceedingly high and most of the characters seem to be related to environmental conditions. However, characteristics like shape of bulliform cells in leaf blade, presence of silica bodies in leaf epidermis, and more importantly the nature of pubescence can be related to systematics, at species level.