How many names for a beloved genus? - Coalescent-based species delimitation in Xanthium L. (Ambrosiinae, Asteraceae)

The species category is the fundamental unit in biology. In the last decades, several studies have been carried out, using sequence information and phylogenies to resolve issues in taxonomically problematic groups. The multispecies coalescent theory, and the species-delimitation methods developed in the last years based on that, offer powerful and objective tools to determine species boundaries using sequence data. The genus Xanthium is a morphologically variable complex with several local forms, nowadays become cosmopolitan due to human-mediated dispersal. Past taxonomic treatments of the genus were based essentially on the burr morphology. They varied considerably in number of recognized species, depending on the importance that the different authors gave to burr traits such as burr size, pubescence, number and length of spines in the burrs, and the degree to which those are hooked. We used sequence information from two plastid regions (the intergenic spacer regions psbA-trnH and trnQ-rps16) and two nuclear ones (ITS1-5.8 S-ITS2 rDNA, and the single-copy nuclear marker D35). Two of the most advanced coalescent-based species delimitation methods (BP&P and STACEY) were applied, in order to objectively determine species boundaries in Xanthium. Results from the species-delimitation methods strongly support scenarios with a reduced number of species. Prior on the effective population size parameter ( theta) had a strong influence on BP&P results. Analyses with large and small theta prior supported species delimitation scenarios with four and five species, respectively. STACEY recognized five cluster in the dataset, all supported by high posterior probability values. Five species are identified in Xanthium, in a great extent corresponding to the infrageneric classification given for the genus in past taxonomic revisions.