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The distribution of many species inhabiting northwestern North America has been heavily influenced by the climatic changes during the late Pleistocene. Several studies have suggested that species were restricted to glacial refugia north and/or south of the continental ice sheet front. It is also hypothesized that the coast of northwestern North America could have been a prime location for glacial refugia because of the lowering of the eustatic sea level and the concomitant rise of the continental shelf because of tectonic rebound. Alternatively, some coastal species distributions and demographics may have been unaffected in the long-term by the last glacial maximum (LGM). We tested the glacial refugium hypothesis on an obligate coastal plant species, Carex macrocephala by sampling 600 individuals from 41 populations with 11 nuclear microsatellite loci and the rpL16 plastid intragenic spacer region. The microsatellite data sets suggest a low level of population differentiation with a standardized G′ST = 0.032 and inbreeding was high with an F = 0.969. The homogenization of the populations along the coast was supported by a principal coordinate analysis,amovas andsamova analyses. Analyses using the rpL16 data set support the results of the microsatellite analyses, with a low FST of 0.042. Coalescent and mismatch analyses using rpL16 suggest that C. macrocephala has not gone through a significant bottleneck within the past 100 000 years, although a much earlier population expansion was indicated by the mismatch analysis. Carex macrocephala exhibits the characteristics of metapopulation dynamics and on the basis of these results, we concluded that it was not restricted to glacial refugia during the LGM, but that it existed as a large metapopulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We fit a molecular data set, consisting of the rpL16 cpDNA marker and eight microsatellite loci, to the isolation-with-migration model as implemented in IMa to test a well-supported phylogenetic hypothesis of relationships within the Carex macrocephala species complex (Cyperaceae). The phylogenetic hypothesis suggests C. macrocephala from North America is reciprocally monophyletic and is sister to a reciprocally monophyletic clade of C. kobomugi. The North American C. macrocephala and C. kobomugi clade form a sister clade with a lineage of Asian C. macrocephala, thereby forming a paraphyletic C. macrocephala species. Not only does the phylogenetic hypothesis suggest C. macrocephala is paraphyletic, but it also suggests that the two lineages which share a partially overlapping distribution, Asian C. macrocephala and C. kobomugi, are not the most closely related. To test these relationships, we used coalescent-based population genetic models to infer divergence time for each lineage pair within the species complex. The coalescent-based models account for the stochastic forces which drive population divergence, and can account for the lineage sorting that occurs prior to lineage divergence. A drawback to phylogenetic-based phylogeographical analyses is that they do not account for stochastic lineage sorting that occurs between gene divergence and lineage divergence. By comparing the relative divergence time of the three main lineages within this group, Asian C. macrocephala, North American C. macrocephala, and C. kobomugi, we concluded that the phylogenetic hypothesis is incorrect, and the divergence between these lineages occurred during the Late Pleistocene epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous approaches have been developed to examine recent and historical gene flow between populations, but few studies have used empirical data sets to compare different approaches. Some methods are expected to perform better under particular scenarios, such as high or low gene flow, but this, too, has rarely been tested. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Saenz-Agudelo et al. (2009 ) apply assignment tests and parentage analysis to microsatellite data from five geographically proximal (2–6 km) and one much more distant (1500 km) panda clownfish populations, showing that parentage analysis performed better in situations of high gene flow, while their assignment tests did better with low gene flow. This unusually complete data set is comprised of multiple exhaustively sampled populations, including nearly all adults and large numbers of juveniles, enabling the authors to ask questions that in many systems would be impossible to answer. Their results emphasize the importance of selecting the right analysis to use, based on the underlying model and how well its assumptions are met by the populations to be analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the sexual transfer of genetic material between species (i.e. introgression) has been documented in many groups of plants and animals, genome-wide patterns of introgression are poorly understood. Is most of the genome permeable to interspecific gene flow, or is introgression typically restricted to a handful of genomic regions? Here, we assess the genomic extent and direction of introgression between three sunflowers from the south-central USA: the common sunflower, Helianthus annuus ssp. annuus; a near-endemic to Texas, Helianthus debilis ssp. cucumerifolius; and their putative hybrid derivative, thought to have recently colonized Texas, H. annuus ssp. texanus. Analyses of variation at 88 genetically mapped microsatellite loci revealed that long-term migration rates were high, genome-wide and asymmetric, with higher migration rates from H. annuus texanus into the two parental taxa than vice versa. These results imply a longer history of intermittent contact between H. debilis and H. annuus than previously believed, and that H. annuus texanus may serve as a bridge for the transfer of alleles between its parental taxa. They also contradict recent theory suggesting that introgression should predominantly be in the direction of the colonizing species. As in previous studies of hybridizing sunflower species, regions of genetic differentiation appear small, whether estimated in terms of FST or unidirectional migration rates. Estimates of recent immigration and admixture were inconsistent, depending on the type of analysis. At the individual locus level, one marker showed striking asymmetry in migration rates, a pattern consistent with tight linkage to a Bateson–Dobzhansky–Muller incompatibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]