Format: ORAL

Alexandre R. Zuntini1, the PAFTOL community

1Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, United Kingdom *Corresponding author: a.zuntini@kew.org

For the past 25 years, the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group has revolutionised the systematics of angiosperms by providing a stable classification system based on robust phylogenetic evidence. This classification has largely been informed by plastid markers. Now, due to advances in high throughput sequencing, the nuclear genome is more easily accessed, allowing us to infer phylogenetic trees from hundreds of nuclear loci. Target sequence capture (e.g. using Angiosperms353 probes) is now routinely used to tap into the nuclear genome, even using DNA from historical collections. These advances, however, demonstrate that the evolutionary history of plants is more complex than the plastid genome suggests, challenging previous classifications. Here, we present novel phylogenetic insights from nuclear data on the circumscription of families, orders and major clades of angiosperms. These insights arise from anuclear phylogenomic research of the Plant Fungal Trees of Life (PAFTOL) project at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which has resulted in genome-scale phylogenetic trees including all angiosperm families and nearly 60% of extant genera. Importantly, many relationships by plastid evidence are corroborated, such as the delimitation of major clades, and deep relationships in the ANITA grade, the monocots and the early-diverging eudicots. However, conflict between nuclear and plastid data is evident across the tree, leading to several changes, e.g., the inclusion of Chloranthales in magnoliids; in rosids, the reduction of fabids and expansion of malvids, and the disintegration of the COM-clade; and in asterids, the break-up of orders Aquifoliales, Bruniales and Icacinales. In other groups, like Santales and Brassicales, notable conflicts are observed, but refining family circumscriptions requires denser sampling in those clades. As expected, cytonuclear conflict is evident throughout the angiosperm tree of life. Future classifications must embrace this conflict to ensure that our knowledge infrastructures are consistent with the complex history of angiosperms.