Postglacial population expansion of Dacrydium pectinatum(Podocar-paceae)in Hainan,southern China,based on cpDNA trnL-F nocoding sequence data

This study determined the sequences of chloro-plast DNA(cpDNA)trnL-F non-coding regions of indi-viduals of a tropical coniferous species,Dacrydium pectinatum,collected from 12 natural populations located in Hainan Province,southern China.Sequence length varied from 868 bp to 876 bp,indicating length polymorphism.Base com-position in the sequences was high in A+T content between 64.17%and 64.95%,and no recombination event occurred(Rm=0).Thirty haplotypes were identified based on statis-tical parsimony algorithm by running the TCS program.Populations of D.pectinatum in Hainan were lacking ge-netic differentiation.Such a deduction was supported by the observed FST values(0.00),AMOVA(24.17%of molecular variance attributed to difference among populations,P>0.05),high values of Nm(ranging from 1.92 to 2.50)and the branching structure in neighbor-joining(NJ)tree con-structed from haplotypes.A‘star-like’pattern was exhibited in the TCS network of trnL-F haplotypes,and majority of the haplotypes coalesced near the tips in NJ tree.Gene ge-nealogies of cpDNA haplotypes proposed a recent popula-tion expansion of D.pectinatum in Hainan,which was fur-ther supported by the results from Tajima’s D test and mis-match distribution analysis.Our data,in conjunction with geological and palynological evidences,showed that in the Holocene,due to global warming,refugee populations of D.pectinatum in Hainan might experience a range expan-sion.