Insularities

   Sub-project 2: Canaries
       Project leader: JBCVCSIC (PI: Juli Caujapé-Castells)
       Stakeholders: Natural History Museum of London
   Funding agency: Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
   Time span: 2011-2013

Summary: We take the Canary Islands and the major islands in the westernmost Mediterranean (Balearics, Corsica and Sardinia) as model systems to undertake a comparative study of the genetic mechanisms underlying the processes that give rise to plant endemics in oceanic and continental islands, respectively. We selected five angiosperm genera with different phylogenetic histories (i. e., belonging to distantly related lineages) and diverging biological types (heterogeneous dispersal syndromes), each featuring a variable number of endemics in each insular enclave. Combining data from the 1C contents in the genomes of the endemic  subset, from polymorphic molecular markers deriving from nuclear and cpDNA, and molecular cytogenetic techniques, we aim at developing a general hypothesis to explore whether the different contrasts between continental and oceanic islands have left significant footprints on various levels of the molecular and genetic structure of phylogenetically related plant endemics, whereby it may be possible to single out general conclusions about the mechanisms underlying plant diversification in both types of insularity.