Poster

         Population Genetics/Genomics

Central California’s Checker Lilies: Exploring the Diversity of Fritillaria Species through Population Genetics

Presenting Author
Andrew Cardenas
Description
This project aims to evaluate how many species/taxa are actually in the group of Fritillaria populations in Central California (currently classified as Fritillaria atropurpurea and Fritillaria pinetorum) through genetic data from a broad geographical survey of populations. Fritillaria is a plant genus in the Liliaceae (lily) family, and these two species are native California wildflowers. Fritillaria pinetorum is a rare plant that is endemic to mountain forests around 3,000 meters in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains into southern California, while F. atropurpurea has a much larger geographical range, from the Sierras to the Dakotas. They are generally found in different but contiguous parts of California, overlapping in the central Sierra Nevada region. These two species are phenotypically very similar aside from slight and inconsistent morphological differences, but are currently listed as two different species. Due to the large size of the nuclear genome in this group (between 30 and 83 Gb for a haploid genome in Fritillaria), chloroplast DNA has been utilized to answer our question. The chloroplast region psbA-trnH has amplified well for all central California species of Fritillaria (including F. atropurpurea, F. pinetorum, F. agrestis, and F. micrantha) and has been sequenced and analyzed. Resulting data have revealed an indel from bp 359-364, characterizing all F. pinetorum and one population of F. atropurpurea. Further genotyping with published chloroplast microsatellites is underway to distinguish and determine the number of Fritillaria taxa in the central California region. Thus far, most microsatellite primer pairs have amplified in our species, with the exception of some populations of F. atropurpurea, and several have shown peaks in the published allele size range. Our taxonomic investigation of the Central California members of the genus Fritillaria may have conservation implications for putative rare and new taxa in this group.