Wiley is a global provider of content and content-enabled workflow solutions in areas of scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly research professional development and education. From an evolutionary point of view it is obvious that ancient as well as recent hybridization coupled with polyploidisation have played a crucial role in diversification within Sesleria. Within the two sections, several informal species groups could be recognized, which show limited congruence with those proposed in the most comprehensive taxonomic treatment of the genus.

vaginalis as a probably recently evolved intersectional hybrid. Sesleria) as non-overlapping clusters and identified S.

In congruence with the plastid sequences, AFLPs resolved the traditionally recognized sections (sect. Their segregation, which is also supported by morphology, increases the number of angiosperm genera endemic to the European Alps from three to five. sphaerocephala as separate genera Psilathera and Sesleriella. This suggests an allopolyploid origin of Sesleria s.str.

In contrast, in the plastid phylogeny Sesleria s.str. sphaerocephala was more distantly related. In the ITS phylogeny tetra- to dodecaploid Sesleria s.str. Finally, we tested previous hypotheses of infrageneric classifications. ovata should be treated as separate genera Sesleriella and Psilathera as proposed previously, or rather included in Sesleria, following most recent Floras. Our first aim was to determine the relationships among Sesleria and putatively closely related genera. We sequenced the plastid trnL-ndhF region and produced amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs) from a comprehensive, ploidy-cytotyped sampling including 292 populations, and produced nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences for a subsample. Of the more than 40 species only two are diploid, all others are tetra- to dodecaploid, and many species comprise several ploidy cytotypes. It is distributed throughout western Eurasia and North Africa with highest taxonomic diversity on the Balkan Peninsula. Sesleria (Poaceae) is a species-rich, taxonomically difficult genus due to high morpho-anatomical variability and weak differentiation of many species.

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