Format: ORAL

Raquel C. Pizzardo1, Deise Pereira Gonalves1, Andre Chanderbali2, Douglas Soltis2, Pam Soltis2, Stephen Smith1 Christopher Dick1

1 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States 2 University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States

Sapotaceae is one of the most important plant families in the world. With around 1,250 species and 62 genera, Sapotaceae is a pantropical family, and is usually restricted to lowland tropical rainforests. However, the taxonomy of the family is unstable and lacks in information of this ecologically important groups of angiosperms in the tropics. Many incongruences between phylogeny and classification in Sapotaceae have been noted, as well as alternative topologies for species-level phylogenies. Here, we generate a higher sampled Sapotaceae phylogeny and, for the first time, we aimed to determine the geographical origin of the pantropical family and the roles vicariance and dispersal have played in shaping its modern distribution. We used target sequence capture data from the Angio353 probe for 199 taxa. The concatenated maximum likelihood molecular phylogeny was constructed using IQ-TREE (v. 1.6) considering GTR+G and partition models, and 1000 bootstrap replicates. Dates of diversification events were estimated using two fossils and the penalized likelihood approach (treePL). The subsequent dated phylogenies were compared and analysed for biogeographical patterns using BioGeoBEARS. The phylogeny moderately recovered the three subfamilies of Sapotaceae, showing relatively high support for Sapotoideae but not for Chrysophyloideae. The phylogeny shows inconsistencies with the current morphological classification. Our results indicate that the ancestral range of the family was in East Asia c. 84 - 80 Ma, with dispersal to South America and Africa. Chrysophylloideae had a early diversification in Africa c. 71 - 57 Ma, with subsequent disperal to the Neotropics (two events) and Australasia (singles event) during the Palocene and Eocene. Sapotoideae had an early diversification in Africa c. 71 - 50 Ma, with migration to Australasia and North America during the Eocene. Those results are somehow congruent with previous studies. Long-distance dispersal has been an important mechanism for range expansion in Sapotaceae.