The integration of fossil and molecular data can provide a synthetic understanding of the ecological and evolutionary history of an organism. We analysed range-wide maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA and paternally inherited chloroplast DNA sequence data with coalescent simulations and traditional population genetic methods to test hypotheses of population divergence generated from the foss...

BACKGROUND Chloroplast genomes provide a wealth of information for evolutionary and population genetic studies. Chloroplasts play a particularly important role in the adaption for aquatic plants because they float on water and their major surface is exposed continuously to sunlight. The subfamily of Lemnoideae represents such a collection of aquatic species that because of photosynthesis repres...

Analysis of a 2175-base pair (bp) SmaI-HindIII fragment of barley chloroplast DNA revealed that rbcL (the gene for the large subunit of ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase) and atpB (the gene for the beta subunit of ATPase) are transcribed divergently and are separated by an untranscribed region of 155-166 bp. The rbcL mRNA has a 320-residue untranslated leader region, whereas the atpB mRNA h...