Format: ORAL

Daro Atienza-Barthelemy1, Manuel J. Maca1,2, Rafael Molina-Venegas2,3

1 Department of Biology (Botany), Faculty of Science, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049, Spain. 2 Biodiversity and Global Change Research Center (CIBC-UAM), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049, Spain. 3 Department of Ecology, Faculty of Science, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049, Spain.

Advances in phylogenetics have provided a revolutionary way to address ethnobotanical data, generally based on calculating the phylogenetic structure of a set of medicinal plants, and identifying the clades showing significant overabundance of such plants (i.e. hot nodes). However, this emerging discipline is in need for more quantitative evidence, and the common assumption that hot nodes represent the main clades responsible for phylogenetic structure remains to be tested. Here, we use the most extended metrics on the field and a comprehensive database (1,803 medicinal species) to calculate the phylogenetic structure of the medicinal plants of Ecuador. Specifically, we (1) conduct the analyses on both species- and genus-level phylogenies to assess the influence of the phylogenetic grain, and (2) evaluate whether hot nodes can tackle the position of phylogenetic structure using a jack-knifing procedure to identify clades significantly influencing phylogenetic distance-based metrics. Phylogenetic structure was found to be strongly dependent on taxonomic level and the identified hot nodes incompletely matched those with a significant contribution to phylogenetic structure metrics. Significant information may be missed whenever the influence of the taxonomic level is not evaluated, and the position of phylogenetic structure cannot be fully tackled by the hot nodes. We suggest combining different phylogenetic grains and methods to identify highly influencing clades before drawing any conclusion that may misguide the search for plants with bioactive potential.