Cytotaxonomy: The end of childhood

By M. Guerra. Plant Biosystems, 2012

126 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Detailed comparative karyotype analyses have proved to be an important tool for taxonomy and for understanding chromosome evolution. The basic principle of cytotaxonomy is that closely related species share a more similar karyotype than less related ones. However, phylogenetic studies have demonstrated that some karyotype features are more often recurrent than previously thought, meaning that similarity is not all. Two other criticisms to the cytotaxonomical interpretation are intraspecific variation, traditionally neglected, and the interpretation of chromosomal alterations based only on classical structural changes, without any investigative support. Chromosome numbers and nuclear DNA content are among the most reliable and practical characters for cytotaxonomical analyses involving a large number of species, whereas chromosome mapping with molecular probes is more recommended for a restricted number of species. In both cases, a robust phylogenetic tree is necessary to understand the relationships between species and their karyotype evolution. Evolutionary inferences based only on putative karyological trends are no longer sustainable.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b13167c86b3ed96d302fe29b0d6a8d9c35eddb72

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Molecular Biology

In Plant Science

Citations in the corpus

The Chromosome Counts Database (CCDB) - a community resource of plant chromosome numbers. (2015, methodology): “Chromosome numbers have also been extensively utilized as an important phylogenetic character in the context of cytotaxonomy (Chatterjee & Kumar Sharma, 1969; Schlarbaum & Tsuchiya, 1984; Guerra, 2012).”