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Factors driving the global decline of cycad diversity.

ABSTRACT: Mounting evidence indicates that we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction period. Given the important goods and services biodiversity delivers to humans, there is a need for a continued commitment to investigate what pre-disposes some taxa to greater risk of extinction. Here, we investigate this question using a phylogenetic comparative method and fitting a cumulative link mixed effect model on biological, ecological and evolutionary data of cycads, the most threatened lineage in the plant kingdom. We identified nine groups of threats to cycads, with habitat loss, over-collection, fire and reproduction failure being the most prominent, but only four of these threats (habitat loss, over-collection, medicinal uses and reproduction failure) clustered on the cycad tree of life. This clustering suggests that closely related species may be exposed to similar threats, perhaps because of geographic regionalization of cycad genera. Nonetheless, the diversity of threats and several variables linked to the biology and ecology of cycads correlate with extinction risk (e.g. altitude, height, diameter, geographic range), and different variables seem to be linked to different IUCN status of cycads. Although their predictive power is generally?

SUBMITTER: Mankga LT

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5506724 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Factors driving the global decline of cycad diversity.

Mankga Ledile T LT Yessoufou Kowiyou K

AoB PLANTS 20170529 4

Mounting evidence indicates that we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction period. Given the important goods and services biodiversity delivers to humans, there is a need for a continued commitment to investigate what pre-disposes some taxa to greater risk of extinction. Here, we investigate this question using a phylogenetic comparative method and fitting a cumulative link mixed effect model on biological, ecological and evolutionary data of cycads, the most threatened lineage in the plant ki ...[more]

PMID: 28721186

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Associations between traits are prevalent in nature, occurring across a diverse range of taxa and traits. Individual traits may co-evolve with one other, and these correlations can be driven by factors intrinsic or extrinsic to an organism. However, few studies, especially in microbes, have simultaneously investigated both across a broad taxonomic range. Here we quantify pairwise associations among 48 traits across 784 diverse yeast species of the ancient budding yeast subphylum Saccharomycotina, assessing the effects of phylogenetic history, genetics, and ecology. RESULTS:We find extensive negative (traits that tend to not occur together) and positive (traits that tend to co-occur) pairwise associations among traits, as well as between traits and environments. These associations can largely be explained by the biological properties of the traits, such as overlapping biochemical pathways. The isolation environments of the yeasts explain a minor but significant component of the variance, while phylogeny (the retention of ancestral traits in descendant species) plays an even more limited role. Positive correlations are pervasive among carbon utilization traits and track with chemical structures (e.g., glucosides and sugar alcohols) and metabolic pathways, suggesting a molecular basis for the presence of suites of traits. In several cases, characterized genes from model organisms suggest that enzyme promiscuity and overlapping biochemical pathways are likely mechanisms to explain these macroevolutionary trends. Interestingly, fermentation traits are negatively correlated with the utilization of pentose sugars, which are major components of the plant biomass degraded by fungi and present major bottlenecks to the production of cellulosic biofuels. Finally, we show that mammalian pathogenic and commensal yeasts have a suite of traits that includes growth at high temperature and, surprisingly, the utilization of a narrowed panel of carbon sources. CONCLUSIONS:These results demonstrate how both intrinsic physiological factors and extrinsic ecological factors drive the distribution of traits present in diverse organisms across macroevolutionary timescales.

Dataset Information

Factors driving the global decline of cycad diversity.

Publications

Factors driving the global decline of cycad diversity.

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